Ten stories provide jolting excursions through a world of desperation and fleeting transcendence, with protagonists ranging from a hard-luck fighter, to a drunken doctor in a remote African aid-station, to a strung-out advertising writer. Reprint.

Cold Snap

StoriesBy Thom Jones

Back Bay Books

Copyright © 1996 Thom Jones
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316472579

Chapter One

Cold Snap

    SON OF A BITCH, there's a cold snap and I dothis number where I leave all the faucets runningbecause my house, and most houses out here onthe West Coast, aren't "real"--they don't havewindows that go up and down, or basements (which protectthe pipes in a way that a crawl space can't), or sidewalksout in the front with a nice pair of towering oak trees or acouple of elms, which a real house will have, one of thosegood old Midwest houses. Out here the windows go side toside. You get no basement. No sidewalk and no real trees,just evergreens, and when it gets cold and snows, nobodyknows what to do. An inch of snow and they cancel schooland the community is paralyzed. "Help me, I'm helpless!"Well, it's cold for a change and I guess that's not so bad,because all the fleas and mosquitoes will freeze, and alsobecause any change is something, and maybe it will help snapme out of this bleak post-Africa depression--oh, baby, I'mso depressed--but I wake up at three in the morning andthink, Oh, no, a pipe is gonna bust, so I run the water andlet the faucets drip and I go outside and turn on the outdoorfaucets, which are the most vulnerable. Sure enough,they were caking up, and I got to them just in the nick oftime, which was good, since in my condition there was noway I could possibly cope with a broken water pipe. I justgot back from Africa, where I was playing doctor to thenatives, got hammered with a nasty case of malaria, and lostthirty pounds, but it was a manic episode I had that causedGlobal Aid to send me home. It was my worst attack todate, and on lithium I get such a bad case of psoriasis thatI look like alligator man. You can take Tegretol for maniabut it once wiped out my white count and almost killed me,so what I like to do when I get all revved up is skin-popsome morphine, which I had with me by the gallon overthere and which will keep you calm--and, unlike booze,it's something I can keep under control. Although I mustconfess I lost my medical license in the States for substanceabuse and ended up with Global Aid when the dust settledover that one. God's will, really. Fate. Karma. Whatever.Anyhow, hypomania is a good thing in Africa, a real motivator,and you can do anything you want over there as longas you keep your feet on the ground and don't parade nakedon the president's lawn in Nairobi and get expelled (whichI did and which will get you expelled; okay, I lied, you can'tdo anything--so sue me). On lithium, while you don'tcrash so bad, you never get high, either, and all you can dois sit around sucking on Primus beer bottles, bitching abouthow hot it is when there's so much work to do.

    While I'm outside checking my faucets, I look my Oldsmobileover and wonder was it last year I changed theantifreeze? Back in bed, it strikes me that it's been threeyears, so I go out and run the engine and sit in the car withmy teeth chattering--it's thirteen below, geez! And prettysoon the warm air is defrosting the car and I drive over tothe hardware section at Safeway and get one of those antifreezetesters with the little balls in it. At four in the morningI'm sitting in my kitchen trying to get it out of theplastic jacket, and it comes out in two parts, with the bulbupside down. No doubt some know-nothing Central Americanput it in upside down for twenty cents an hour in someslave factory. I know he's got problems--fact is, I've beenthere and could elucidate his problems--but how aboutme and my damn antifreeze? I mean, too bad about you,buddy, how about me? And I'm trying to jury-rig it when Irealize there is a high potential for breaking the glass andcutting my thumb, and just as that voice that is me, that isalways talking to me, my ego, I guess, tells me, "Be careful,Richard, so you don't cut your thumb"--at that instant, Islice my thumb down to the bone. So the next thing youknow I'm driving to the hospital with a towel on my thumbthinking, A minute ago everything was just fine, and nowI'm driving myself to the emergency room!

    Some other guy comes in with this awful burn becausea pressure cooker exploded in his face, and he's got thisreceding hairline, and you can see the way the skin is peeledback--poached-looking. The guy's going to need a hairpiecefor sure. A doctor comes out eating a sandwich, andI hear him tell the nurse to set up an I.V. line and startrunning some Dilaudid for the guy, which he deserves, considering.I would like some for my thumb, but all I get isNovocain, and my doctor says, "You aren't going to getwoozy on me, are you?" I tell him no, I'm not like that, butI have another problem, and he says, "What's that?" and Itell him I can't jack off left-handed. Everybody laughs, becauseit's the graveyard shift, when that kind of joke isappropriate--even in mixed company. Plus, it's true.

    After he stitches me up, I'm in no pain, although I say,"I'll bet this is going to hurt tomorrow," and he says no,he'll give me some pain medication, and I'm thinking, Whata great doctor. He's giving me pain medication. And whilehe's in a giving mood I hit him up for some prostate antibioticsbecause my left testicle feels very heavy.

    "Your left testicle feels heavy?" he says skeptically.

    Yeah, every guy gets it, shit; I tell him my left nut feelslike an anvil. I mean, I want to cradle it in my hand whenI'm out and about, or rest it on a little silk pillow when I'mstationary. It doesn't really hurt, but I'm very much consciousof having a left testicle, whereas I have teeth and abelly button and a right testicle and I don't even know. I tellhim I don't want a finger wave, because I've been throughthis a thousand times. My prostate is backing up into theseminal vesicles, and if you don't jerk off it builds up andgets worse, and the doctor agrees--that does happen, andhe doesn't really want to give me a finger wave, especiallywhen I tell him that a urologist checked it out a couple ofmonths back. He puts on a plastic glove and feels my testicle,pronounces it swollen, and writes a script for antibiotics,after which he tells me to quit drinking coffee. I wasgoing to tell him that I don't jerk off because I'm a sexfiend; I have low sex drive, and it's actually not that muchfun. I just do it to keep the prostate empty. Or should I tellhim I'm a doctor myself, albeit defrocked, that I just gotback from Africa and my nut could be infected with elephantiasis?Highly unlikely, but you never know. But hewon't know diddle about tropical medicine--that's mydepartment, and I decide I will just shut my mouth, whichis a first for me.

    The duty nurse is pretty good-looking, and she contradictsthe doctor's orders--gives me a cup of coffee anyhow,plus a roll, and we're sitting there quietly, listening tothe other doctor and a nurse fixing the guy with the burnedforehead. A little human interaction is taking place and mydepression is gone as I begin to feel sorry for the guy withthe burn, who is explaining that he was up late with insomniacooking sweet potatoes when the pressure cooker blew.He was going to candy them with brown sugar and eatthem at six in the morning and he's laughing, too, becauseof the Dilaudid drip. After Linda Ronstadt sings "Just OneLook" on the radio, the announcer comes on and says thatwe've set a record for cold--it's thirteen and a half belowat the airport--and I notice that the announcer is happy,too; there's a kind of solidarity that occurs when suffering isinflicted on the community by nature.

    My own thing is the Vincent van Gogh effect. I readwhere he "felt like a million" after he cut off his ear. It onlylasted for a couple of days. They always show you the seriesof four self-portraits that he painted at different times in hislife as his mental condition went progressively downhill.Van Gogh One is a realistic-looking pic, but as life goes onand his madness gets worse he paints Van Gogh Four and itlooks as though he's been doing some kind of bad LSD,which is how the world had been looking to me until I cutmy thumb. It gave me a three-day respite from the blues,and clarity came into my life, and I have to remind myself bywriting this down that all the bad stuff does pass if you canwait it out. You forget when you're in the middle of it, soduring that three-day break I slapped this note on the refrigeratordoor: "Richard, you are a good and loving person,and all the bad stuff does pass, so remember that thenext time you get down and think that you've always beendown and always will be down, since that's paranoia and itgets you nowhere. You're just in one of your Fyodor Dostoyevskimoods--do yourself a favor and forget it!"

I FELT so good I actually had the nerve to go out and buya new set of clothes and see a movie, and then, on the lastday before the depression came back, I drove out to WesternState and checked my baby sister, Susan, out for a daytrip. Susan was always a lot worse than me; she heard voicesand pulled I don't know how many suicide attempts untilshe took my squirrel pistol and put a .22 long-rifle slugthrough the temple--not really the temple, because at thelast minute you always flinch, but forward of the temple,and it was the most perfect lobotomy. I remember hearingthe gun pop and how she came into my room (I was homefrom college for the summer) and said, "Richard, I just shotmyself, how come I'm not dead?" Her voice was calm insteadof the usual fingernails-on-the-chalkboard voice, thewhen-she-was-crazy (which was almost always) voice, and Irealized later that she was instantly cured, the very momentthe bullet zipped through her brain. Everyone said it wassuch a shame because she was so beautiful, but what goodare looks if you are in hell? And she let her looks go at thehospital because she really didn't have a care in the world,but she was still probably the most beautiful patient at WesternState. I had a fresh occasion to worry about her on thistrip when I saw an attendant rough-handling an old man tostop him from whining, which it did. She'd go along withanything, and she had no advocate except me. And then Ialmost regretted going out there, in spite of my do-goodmood, because Susan wanted to go to the Point DefianceZoo to see Cindy, the elephant that was on the news afterthey transferred the attendant who took care of her, fordefying orders and actually going into the elephant pen onthe sly to be her friend.

    There are seven hundred elephants in North Americanzoos, and although Cindy is an Asian elephant and a femaleand small, she is still considered the most dangerous elephantin America. Last year alone, three people were killedby elephants in the United States, and this is what Susanhad seen and heard on the color television in the warddayroom, and she's like a child--she wants to go out andsee an elephant when it's ten below zero. They originallyhad Cindy clamped up in a pen tighter than the one they'vegot John Gotti in down in Marion, Illinois, and I don'tremember that the catalogue of Cindy's crimes includedhuman murder. She was just a general troublemaker, andthey were beating her with a two-by-four when some animalactivist reported it and there was a big scandal thatended with Cindy getting shipped down to the San DiegoZoo; I think there was some kind of escape (don't quote meon that) where Cindy was running around on a golf coursein between moves, and then a capture involving tranquilizerdarts, and when they couldn't control Cindy in San Diegothey shipped her back up here to Tacoma and put her inmaximum-security confinement. It was pretty awful. I toldSusan that over in India Cindy would have a job haulinglogs or something, and there would be an elephant boy toscrub her down at night with a big brush while she lay in theriver, and the elephant boy would be with her at all times,her constant companion. Actually, the elephant would bemore important than the boy, I told her, and that's how youshould handle an elephant in America--import an experiencedelephant boy for each one, give the kids a green card,pay them a lot of overtime, and have them stay with theelephants around the clock. You know, quality time. Howcould you blame Cindy for all the shit she pulled? And inthe middle of this, Susan has a tear floating off her cheekand I don't know if it's a tear caused by the cold or if shewas touched by Cindy's plight. The reason they sent mysister to the nuthouse was that you could light a fire on thefloor in front of her and she would just sit there and watchit burn. When our parents died, I took her to my place inWashington state and hired helpers to look after her, butthey would always quit--quit while I was over in the ThirdWorld, where it's impossible to do anything. It was like,Meanwhile, back in the jungle/Meanwhile, back in the States... Apart from her lack of affect, Susan was always logicaland made perfect sense. She was kind of like a Mr. Spockwho just didn't give a shit anymore except when it came tochildish fun and games. All bundled up, with a scarf overher ears, in her innocence she looked like Eva Marie Saint inOn the Waterfront.

    We drove over to Nordstrom's in the University Districtand I bought Suz some new threads and then took her to ahair salon where she got this chic haircut, and she was lookingso good that I almost regretted it, 'cause if thosewacked-out freaks at the hospital weren't hitting on herbefore they would be now. It was starting to get dark andtime to head back when Susan spots the Space Needle fromI-5--she's never been there, so I took her to the top andshe wandered outside to the observation deck, where thewind was a walking razor blade at five hundred and eighteenfeet, but Susan is grooving on the lights of Seattle and withher homemade lobotomy doesn't experience pain in quitethe way a normal person does, and I want her to have a littlefun, but I'm freezing out there, especially my thumb, whichached. I didn't want to pop back inside in the sheltered partand leave her out there, though, because she might want topitch herself over the side. I mean, they've got safety nets,but what if she's still got some vestige of a death wish? Wehad dinner in the revolving dining room, and people werelooking at us funny because of Susan's eating habits, whichdeteriorate when you live in a nuthouse, but we got throughthat and went back to my place to watch TV, and after thatI was glad to go to sleep--but I couldn't sleep because ofmy thumb. I was thinking I still hadn't cashed in the scriptfor the pain pills when Susan comes into my bedroom nakedand sits down on the edge of the bed.

    "Ever since I've been shot, I feel like those animals inthe zoo. I want to set them free," she says, in a remarkabledisplay of insight, since that scar in her frontal lobes has gotmore steel bars than all the prisons of the world, and, as arule, folks with frontal-lobe damage don't have much insight.I get her to put on her pajamas, and I remember whatit used to be like when she stayed at home--you alwayshad to have someone watching her--and I wished I hadgotten her back to the hospital that very night, because shewas up prowling, and suddenly all my good feelings of thepast few days were gone. I felt crappy, but I had to stayvigilant while my baby sister was tripping around the housewith this bullet-induced, jocular euphoria.

    At one point she went outside barefoot. Later I foundher eating a cube of butter. Then she took out all the cannedfoods in my larder and stacked them up--Progresso blackbeans (beaucoup), beef-barley soup, and canned carrotjuice--playing supermarket. I tell her, "Mrs. Ma'am, I'lltake one of those, and one of those, and have you got anypeachy pie?"

    She says, "I'm sorry, Richard, we haven't got any peachypie."

    "But, baby, I would sure like a nice big piece of peachypie, heated up, and some vanilla ice cream with some rumsauce and maybe something along the lines of a maraschinocherry to put on the top for a little garnish. Nutmeg woulddo. Or are you telling me this is just a soup, beans, andcarrot-juice joint? Is that all you got here?"

    "Yes, Richard. Just soup and beans. They're very filling,though."

    "Ahhm gonna have to call Betty Crocker, 'cause I'm inthe mood for some pie, darlin'."

    Suzie looks at me sort of worried and says that she thinksBetty Crocker is dead. Fuck. I realized I just had to sit on thecouch and watch her, and this goes on and on, and of courseI think I hear someone crashing around in the yard, so I getmy .357 out from under my pillow and walk around the perimeterof the house, my feet crunching on the frozen snow.There was nobody out there. Back inside I checked on Susan,who was asleep in my bed. When I finally saw the rising of thesun and heard birds chirping to greet the new day, I went tothe refrigerator, where I saw my recent affirmation: "Richard,you are a good and loving person," etc. I ripped it off therefrigerator and tore it into a thousand tiny pieces. Only anidiot would write something like that. It was like, I can't hackit in Africa, can't hack it at home--all I can hack is dead. SoI took all the bullets out of the .357 except one, spun thechamber, placed the barrel against my right temple, andsqueezed the trigger. When I heard the click of the hammer--voila!I instantly felt better. My thumb quit throbbing.My stomach did not burn. The dread of morning andof sunlight had vanished, and I saw the dawn as somethinggood, the birdsong wonderful. Even the obscure, take-it-for-grantedobjects in my house--the little knickknackscovered in an inch of dust, a simple wooden chair, my morningcoffee cup drying upside down on the drainboard--seemedso relevant, so alive and necessary. I was glad for lifeand glad to be alive, especially when I looked down at thegun and saw that my bullet had rotated to the firing chamber.The Van Gogh effect again. I was back from Van Gogh Fourto Van Gogh One.

THEY'RE calling from the hospital, because I kept Susanovernight: "Where is Susan?" "She's watching Days of OurLives," I say as I shove the .357 into a top drawer next tothe phone book. "Is she taking her Stelazine?" "Yes," I say."Absolutely. Thanks for your concern. Now, goodbye!"

    Just then the doorbell rings, and what I've got is a pairof Jehovah's Witnesses. I've seen enough of them on theDark Continent to overcome an instinctive dread, since theyseem to be genuinely content, proportionately--like, ifyou measured a bunch of them against the general populationthey are very happy people, and so pretty soon we'redrinking Sanka and Susan comes out and they are talkingabout Christ's Kingdom on Earth where the lion lies downwith the lamb, and Susan buys every word of it, 'cause it'slike that line "Unless they come to me as little children..."Susan is totally guileless and the two Witnesses are withoutmuch guile, and I, the king of agnostics, listen and think,How's a lion going to eat straw? It's got a G.I. systemdesigned to consume flesh, bones, and viscera--it's gotsharp teeth, claws, and predatory instincts, not twenty-sevenstomachs, like some bovine Bossie the Cow or whatever.And while I'm paging through a copy of Awake!, I see alittle article from the correspondent in Nigeria entitled"The Guinea Worm--Its Final Days." As a doctor of tropicalmedicine, I probably know more about Dracunculusmedinensis, the "fiery serpent," or Guinea worm, than anyonein the country. Infection follows ingestion of watercontaining crustacea (Cyclops). The worms penetrate thegut wall and mature in the retroperitoneal space, where theycan grow three feet in length, and then generally migrate tothe lower legs, where they form a painful blister. What theAfricans do is burst the ulcer and extract the adult worm byhooking a stick under it and ever so gently tugging it out,since if you break it off the dead body can become septicand the leg might have to be removed. The pain of theGuinea worm is on a par with the pain of gout, and it cantake ten days to nudge one out. The bad part is they usuallycome not in singles but in multiples. I've seen seven comeout of an old man's leg.

    If and when Global Aid sends me back to Africa, I willhelp continue the worm-eradication program, and as theWitnesses delight Susan with tales of a Heaven on Earth I'mthinking of the heat and the bugs in the equatorial zone,and the muddy water that the villagers take from rivers--theypour it in jugs and let the sediment settle for an hourand then dip from the top, where it looks sort of clean; it'shard to get through to them that Cyclops crustacea may befloating about invisibly and one swallow could get you sevenworms, a swallow you took three years ago. You can talk tothe villagers until you're blue in the face and they'll drink itanyhow. So you have to poison the Cyclops without overpoisoningthe water. I mean, it can be done, but, given theway things work over there, you have to do everythingyourself if you want it done right, which is why I hate theidea of going back: you have to come on like a one-manband.

    On the other hand, Brother Bogue and the other brothersin the home office of Global Aid don't trust me; theydon't like it when I come into the office irrepressibly happy,like Maurice Chevalier in his tuxedo and straw hat--"Jambojambo, bwana, jambo bonjour!"--and give everyoneone of those African soft handshakes, and then maybedo a little turn at seventy-eight revolutions per minute:"Oh, oui oui, it's delightful for me, walking my baby backhome!" or "Hey, ain't it great, after staying out late? Zangkheffen for leetle gorls." Etc. They hate it when I'm high andthey hate it when I'm low, and they hate it most if I'mfeeling crazy/paranoid and come in and say, "You won'tbelieve what happened to me now!" To face those humorlessbrothers every day and stay forever in a job as a medicaladministrator, to wear a suit and tie and drive I-5 morningand night, to climb under the house and tape those pipeswith insulation --you get in the crawl space and the dryer-hosevent is busted and there's lint up the ass, a time bombfor spontaneous combustion, funny the house hasn't blownalready (and furthermore, no wonder the house is dusty),and, hey, what, carpenter ants, too? When I think of all that:Fair America, I bid you adieu!

    But things are basically looking up when I get Suz backto the hospital. As luck has it, I meet an Indian psychiatristwho spent fifteen years in Kampala, Uganda--he was oneof the three shrinks in the whole country--and I ask himhow Big Daddy Idi Amin is doing. Apparently, he's doingfine, living in Saudi Arabia with paresis or something, andthe next thing you know the doc is telling me he's going toreview Susan's case file, which means he's going to put herin a better ward and look out for her, and that's a load offmy mind. Before I go, Suz and I take a little stroll aroundthe spacious hospital grounds--it's a tranquil place. I can'thelp thinking that if Brother Bogue fires me--though I'mdetermined to behave myself after my latest mishap--Icould come here and take Haldol and lithium, watch colorTV, and drool. Whatever happened to that deal where youjust went off to the hospital for a "little rest," with nostigma attached? Maybe all I need is some rest.

    Susan still has those Jehovah's Witnesses on her mind.As we sit on a bench, she pulls one of their booklets out ofher coat and shows me scenes of cornucopias filled withfruit and bounty, rainbows, and vividly colored vistas of aheaven on earth. Vistas that I've seen in a way, howeverparadoxically, in these awful Third World places, and I'mthinking, Let them that have eyes see; and let them thathave ears hear--that's how it is, and I start telling Suzabout Africa, maybe someday I can take her there, and shegets excited and asks me what it's like. Can you see lions?

    And I tell her, "Yeah, baby, you'll see lions, giraffes,zebras, monkeys, and parrots, and the Pygmies." And shereally wants to see Pygmies. So I tell her about a Pygmychief who likes to trade monkey meat for tobacco, T-shirts,candy, and trinkets, and about how one time when I wentmanic and took to the bush I stayed with this tribe, andwent on a hunt with them, and we found a honeycomb inthe forest; one of the hunters climbed up the tree to knockit down, oblivious of all the bees that were biting him.There were about five of us in the party and maybe tenpounds of honey and we ate all of it on the spot, didn't savean ounce, because we had the munchies from smokingdope. I don't tell Suz how it feels to take an airplane to NewYork, wait four hours for a flight to London, spend sixhours in a transient lounge, and then hop on a nine-hourflight to Nairobi, clear customs, and ride on the back of afeed truck driven by a kamikaze African over potholes,through thick red dust, mosquitoes, black flies, tsetse flies,or about river blindness, bone-break fever, bilharziasis,dumdum fever, tropical ulcers, AIDS, leprosy, etc. To gothrough all that to save somebody's life and maybe havethem spit in your eye for the favor--I don't tell her aboutit, the way you don't tell a little kid that Santa Claus is afabrication. And anyhow if I had eyes and could see, andears and could hear--it very well might be the Garden ofEden. I mean, I can fuck up a wet dream with my attitude.I don't tell her that lions don't eat straw, never have, and soshe's happy. And it's a nice moment for me, too, in a funny-assway. I'm beginning to feel that with her I might findanother little island of stability.

ANOTHER hospital visit: winter has given way to springand the cherry blossoms are out. In two weeks it's gonefrom ten below to sixty-five, my Elavil and lithium are kickingin, and I'm feeling fine, calm, feeling pretty good. (I'mready to go back and rumble in the jungle, yeah! Sha-lahla-la-la-lah.) Susan tells me she had a prophetic dream.She's unusually focused and articulate. She tells me shedreamed the two of us were driving around Heaven in ablue '67 Dodge.

    "A '67 Dodge. Baby, what were we, the losers ofHeaven?"

    "Maybe, but it didn't really matter because we werethere and we were happy."

    "What were the other people like? Who was there? WasArthur Schopenhauer there?"

    "You silly! We didn't see other people. Just the houses.We drove up this hill and everything was like in a WaltDisney cartoon and we looked at one another and smiledbecause we were in Heaven, because we made it, becausethere wasn't any more shit."

    "Now, let me get this straight. We were driving aroundin a beat-up car--"

    "Yes, Richard, but it didn't matter."

    "Let me finish. You say people lived in houses. Thatmeans people have to build houses. Paint them, clean them,and maintain them. Are you telling me that people inHeaven have jobs?"

    "Yes, but they like their jobs."

    "Oh, God, does it never end? A job! What am I goingto do? I'm a doctor. If people don't get sick there, they'llprobably make me a coal miner or something."

    "Yes, but you'll love it." She grabs my arm with bothhands, pitches her forehead against my chest, and laughs.It's the first time I've heard Susan laugh, ever--since wewere kids, I mean.

    "Richard, it's just like Earth but with none of the badstuff. You were happy, too. So please don't worry. Is Africalike the Garden of Eden, Richard?"

    "It's lush all right, but there's lots and lots of deadtime," I say. "It's a good place to read Anna Karenina. Doyou get to read novels in Heaven, hon? Have they got alibrary? After I pull my shift in the coal mine, do I get totake a nice little shower, hop in the Dodge, and drive overto the library?"

    Susan laughs for the second time. "We will travel fromglory to glory, Richard, and you won't be asking existentialquestions all the time. You won't have to anymore. AndMom and Dad will be there. You and me, all of us in perfecthealth. No coal mining. No wars, no fighting, no discontent.Satan will be in the Big Pit. He's on the earth nowtormenting us, but these are his last days. Why do you thinkwe are here?"

    "I often ask myself that question."

    "Just hold on for a little while longer, Richard. Can youdo that? Will you do it for me, Richard? What good wouldHeaven be if you're not there? Please, Richard, tell meyou'll come."

    I said, "Okay, baby, anything for you. I repent."

    "No more Fyodor Dostoyevski?"

    "I'll be non-Dostoyevski. It's just that, in the meantime,we're just sitting around here --waiting for Godot?"

    "No, Richard, don't be a smart-ass. In the meantime weeat lunch. What did you bring?"

    I opened up a deli bag and laid out chicken-salad-sandwichhalves on homemade bread wrapped in whitebutcher paper. The sandwiches were stuffed with alfalfasprouts and grated cheese, impaled with toothpicks withred, blue, and green cellophane ribbons on them, and therewere two large, perfect, crunchy garlic pickles on the side.And a couple of cartons of strawberry Yoplait, two tubs offruit salad with fresh whipped cream and little woodenspoons, and two large cardboard cups of aromatic, steaming,fresh black coffee.

    It begins to rain, and we have to haul ass into the frontseat of my Olds, where Suz and I finish the best little lunchof a lifetime and suddenly the Shirelles are singing, "This isdedicated to the one I love," and I'm thinking that I'mgonna be all right, and in the meantime what can be betterthan a cool, breezy, fragrant day, rain-splatter diamonds onthe wraparound windshield of a Ninety-eight Olds with aview of cherry trees blooming in the light spring rain?

Continues...

Excerpted from Cold Snapby Thom Jones Copyright © 1996 by Thom Jones. Excerpted by permission.
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