Snow Gets in Your Hair

Reese and Jockstrap ditched the bar for a drunk cigarette and argued over who took fault for having none; neither’d possessed them in the first place.

Snow blanket, beer jacket, big green-sided highway bar with serious shit kicking speakers screaming solid vibration. Six stolen beers from the bathroom of the “Saloon” bulged out Reese’s pockets, made him look the part of a showy bodybuilder. Reese was convinced a hole in Jockstraps pocket was itself an admission of guilt.

“If you were any semblance of a respectable lawyer,” slurred Reese, “you’d have them locked in a silver cigar box for moments like right just now.”

“Suck me,” said Jockstrap.

It was tradition; green name tags were punched in by bloody knuckles in the soft cork surrounding the entrance archway, crawling inside among license plates and deer heads, warped into the shape of the trees and trails of Blonc Montis Ski Way. Shork cork and polymer and dried blood got scooped up with the discarded shock tops sitting in the cooler outside: three feet of snow. An awning stretched above the Saloon’s front porch and around the bowing roof to a backyard pavilion: marshmallow tables, marshmallow cars, marshmallow roof on a marshmallow bar.

The middle of the bar drew critical mass. Sunni and Stormi huddled in parkas as defensive padding if anything, a counterweight to the energy pressing up, up, out, bartenders in orbit bouncing down the only vacant cavity in the whole place. Eddie the bartender broke cans with his teeth and slung them tumbling off the bar at drop dead drunks. The bartops were sticky. Transvested yuppies like Sunni, Stormi, Reese, and Jockstrap presses wall to wall, sweat and flesh, denim and DryVent. Moisture hung in the air, out the windows, chugging in little breaths against the streetlights like the townhouse of a dozen smoking burghers. Colorful cultural pigments: mousefaced girls in Patagonia dressed to impress the ski bums. But let’s not be inappropriate – now all the bums were from Conneticut too.

A few voyeurs were feeding on vibrations only. Dak Hescock was across the street debating some z’s in a patrol car. Here was a dilemma: wipers on, car on, lights on: car off, lights off, wipers off. And as he debated his own indecisiveness, boy, chasing drunkies is fun, his car became slowly encrusted in a wet cottony deluge. Ah shit. Easier pursued on foot, no?

Eddie put four beers between Reese and Jockstrap to keep them from scrambling each other’s lawyerly skulls. Eddie was the free one of the bunch, though his lungs were cruddy and cagy in this rising mist. He gathered the strange blinding morse from Dak’s car, he alone. Eddie, the party, and the four beers managed to coax the quartet against each other.

“I’m Stormi,” she shouted above the crowd.

“I’m Snowi,” shouted a powder sugared Reese.

Sunni took to brushing Jockstrap’s jacket. The carpet was soaked, a high sweak seething from the hundreds of ski boots, doc martins, and moccasins. There were also mice in the walls.

“And the bathroom?” spat Jockstrap, and stormed headfirst to stamp them out. Sunni vaulted behind to slam the back wall, collapsing a small tower of empty cases, and raced to lock the door. A cuck-chair, nay, a cuck throne of Pabst Blue Ribbon Sixteen-Oz. Twenty-Four Packs shone bright in the weak lamplight, half-pilfered by previous pissers, ripe for swordfight spectating. Stormi sat down and beckoned Jockstrap before the door swelled at the hinges, popped inwards, snapped back under human mass, and knocked Jockstrap down mid-stream. Jockstrap on his back, zippers catching beer taps, mixing that stale booze smell with the new booze smell, that much sweeter when sudsy, snowy foam hit the carpet, stung your nose, smacked your lips, rancid reminder of fossilized parties, surefire smell to harken your way toward fresh beer. Sunni had her front row seat to watch Stormi and since renomened Snowi verbally brawl, asserting he was indeed born yesterday and shouldn’t be expected to know how much force a bathroom door can take.

Now it could start. The Rugrat Cleanup. Flash the lights, wrap it up kids. Take things home or I’ll take it for you. Sway outside like novice sailors. Search for cigarettes in doomed places, pockets, friens, book for the cars, rev those wipers. Don’t forget your DD in the trench; he shot back to the bar to ride a killer buzz with, wait, yeah, it was Sunni and Jockstrap sharing two cans of Pabst and a grip of Old Granddad, fighting over tabs on their beer cans, linking arms for “down the hatch.” Hescock had already received a half dozen calls about unstoppable drunk snowcats, drunk snowmobiles, drunk sledding: cuff ‘em, leave ‘em, face to the pavement. Jersey plate? Leave him up facing. Drown him in the snowfall.

Sunni saw the lights and the whining wheels and tugged Jockstrap’s collar. “Wanna come someplace secret?”

“All I want,” he panted, tugging his own collar, “is for the fucking roof to cave in.”

They stole snow pants, jackets, not that these newfound detainees would need them where they were going. Boxton had quite the little prison, that’s if slippery Dak caught even one. They swiped a case with Eddie’s blessing. Jockstrap held it with two hands, but Sunni snatched the handle, bounding towards the back porch. Behind, the Deerfield River laid where it still dictated the curve of the highway, and how the headlight’s penumbra curled on the dip of the hill. Jockstrap skipped behind, swiped the case, tripped and fell, laughing down the backslope while Sunni shrieked sliding headfirst, penguin style.

They crawled back up. They drank and lobbed their empties over the cruxpoint they fell from, the bound whining bodies splayed in the mud and gunk, wriggling and arrested like weenies on the roller. They were dusted. The picture of some Decemberist defeat. Stormi were even cuffed together, face down, trying to gum a kiss while flat on the ground. Even now, Jockstrap heard his voice a few hours from now: Hey, Jockstrap! Get me off, whudda?

Serious powder. Strangers evaded the officer by benefit of his own indecision, running stark across the highways in little deltas. It all comes back to Blonc Montis, the weaving trails, rock walls, goat paths Dak preened over with a flashlight. Yikes, with a flashlight!

“Hey Dirtball,” rasped a smoker. Wow, smoking right now. There was smoke puffing out of a nearby woodshed like a sugar house. Jockstrap brought Sunni and the Pabst into the seriously overcrowded hot box to a small, secretive cheer. Bundled in his own coat, snaking her arms into his sleeves, Sunni curled around him and made a concave of his gut. Now they were snowed on by sawdust, a real itch in their coats, stuck in the sweat of their necks, snowed in if they tried to test the swing of the door. If he tried to look up, he saw the gold paint chip and fall. One in his eye, ow. “Monc Blontis Vino.”

Jockstrap peered out a crack in the wood. Don’t you love slummin’ it, Jock? Mingling with the locals? Or are you just repurposed just like this wood? You can see this culture, burned brief and rough for a momentary regression into bums as if to say hey little yankee, you get a few years to slum it. But don’t forget who’s really allowed to have fun.