Snow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Snow

  Copyright

  Other Titles by Howard Odentz

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  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Please visit these websites for more information about Howard Odentz

  Snow

  by

  Howard Odentz

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-740-3

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2016 by Howard Odentz

  Published in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites

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  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo/Art credits:

  Man (manipulated) © Angelo Cordeschi | Dreamstime.com

  :Mbss:01:

  Other Titles by

  Howard Odentz

  The Dead (A Lot) Trilogy

  Dead (A Lot)

  Wicked Dead

  Dead End

  (coming soon)

  Little Killers A to Z

  Bloody Bloody Apple

  1

  THE NIGHT MY friends and I almost triggered the next ice age, I was with Danny McDermott and Jackie Kagan. We had been driving around the Western Massachusetts hill towns for hours, hitting all our usual hangouts, looking for something good to smoke, but we weren’t having any luck. Greenfield Center was dry. So was Covered Bridge and Purgatory Chasm, and I wasn’t about to drive all the way down the Mass Pike to the Chicopee Projects.

  I’d like think we weren’t that desperate.

  “Tyler?” Jackie muttered from the back seat of my pickup in a voice that was probably deeper than mine. “Are you sure you don’t have any roaches in your ashtray?”

  “You smoked them last weekend,” I reminded her.

  “Oh,” she grumbled. “Well that sucks balls.” Jackie slouched, her arms folded over her almost non-existent chest, and pouted. Since pouting wasn’t exactly in Jackie’s arsenal because she was basically a dude in a girl-suit, she just looked pissed off.

  “You have balls?” quipped Danny, who was the polar opposite of Jackie. “That’s awesome. I didn’t even know you got a pair installed.”

  “Yeah,” sneered Jackie from the back seat. “I’ll get you the name of my doctor. Someday those little peas of yours are going to need an upgrade.” Even in the dark chill of the autumn night, I could tell she was probably smiling a little.

  To say Danny was effeminate was an understatement. I could feel the flames rolling off of him, but I didn’t care. Danny was really funny, and I’d known him since forever. Besides, he wasn’t my type. I was more into girls these days.

  “Now where?” Danny asked as he looked out the window. “If we have to spend tomorrow morning in detention, I’m spending my Friday night baked out of my gourd.”

  “I can’t believe we have detention on a Saturday,” Jackie grumbled.

  “Hey,” I said. “If you weren’t such a pussy in Biology we wouldn’t be having detention in the first place.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny in his signature high pitched voice.

  Jackie had refused to dissect a frog in Mr. Caron’s advanced bio class then opted for calling him a douchebag when he failed her for the assignment.

  Danny laughed. So did I.

  Wham—detention for all three of us.

  Frankly, I was surprised that Jackie wouldn’t cut the toad. I always pictured her going into the army after she graduated high school to learn how to kill things with a Bowie knife. She was tough like that.

  But now, our Saturday morning was ruined, and it looked like our Friday night was turning into a total bust, too

  “Let’s go to The Toke and Blow,” said Jackie from the back seat.

  They called the foliage dump ‘The Toke and Blow’ because that’s where everyone in the hill towns partied. The name was rude, but a little funny, and people had been calling it that since my parents were kids.

  During the fall in Western Massachusetts, when it was almost a cardinal sin to light a match for fear that all the dead leaves would start burning and never stop, everyone brought truck loads to the dump and mounded death into piles higher than our heads.

  Eventually, with wind, rain, and a whole lot of the white stuff, the leaves mulched down, leaving a perpetual stew of rotting oak and maple with a moldy sort of smell that kept most adults away—but not us teenagers.

  Not when getting wasted or laid was on the menu.

  “Why?” I shrugged. “We don’t have anything to toke and I don’t think anyone in this truck is blowing anyone else in this truck anytime soon.”

  “Someone will have weed,” Danny said. “Maybe Mitch Finnegan will be there.”

  Jackie and I both groaned. “Give it a rest,” she grumbled. “That guy’s forbidden fruit.”

  “See,” said Danny, picking up his feet and putting them against my dash. “She called him ‘fruit’. There’s hope for me yet.”

  “No there’s not,” I said. “Not even a little.”

  “Party pooper,” Danny sighed and pressed the button to recline his seat.

  Five minutes later I was palming the wheel of my pickup down the road past Dumpling’s Candle Shoppe on Route 2, toward the regional transfer station and The Toke and Blow beyond. The foliage dump was up against the woods and everyone knew not to go beyond the tree-line too far.

  Turn around even once to pee and you could find yourself lost and trekking toward Vermont.

  When we got there, there was only one other truck parked in the dark.

  “See,” pointed Danny as I pulled up next to the familiar pickup, a little more rusted out than mine. “I told you Mitch Finnegan would be here.”

  “That’s just great,” said Jackie as she pushed on the back of my seat so I would hurry up and get out of the truck so she could tilt it forward and get out, too. “If Mitch is here somewhere that means he’s with that ho, Patty Parkman. They’re probably getting wasted and making the beast with two backs.” She pantomimed the obvious with her hands.

  As it turned out, that was the farthest thing from the truth.

  2

  BEING BROUGHT UP around here, I knew to grab a flashlight. I needed it if I was going to go spelunking in The Toke and Blow in search of a guy who could understandably murder us on the spot for committing coitus interruptus in search of a bone.

  The night was eerily quiet and new-moon dark. What’s worse, the sky was cloudy, which made The Toke and Blow scary and black.

  “I’m not going into the woods,” Danny said as he pointed to the forest. He was short and blonde, but really fit because he was on the gymnastics team at school. He pulled out a cigarette and lit
it, tilting his head up and blowing smoke in the air. “I’ll wait.”

  “Not a chance,” Jackie said and grabbed his arm.

  “Hey, Mr. Man,” he squealed. “You’re hurting me.” She just smirked and pulled him along. Jackie was one of those girls who didn’t want to be called a girl. She went through this whole thing a couple of years ago where she told the school administration that the teachers now had to call her ‘Jack’ and that she wasn’t a ‘she’ anymore. It was wildly confusing at first, more for the teachers than for us. Then sometime around last year she let the whole weird ‘Jack’ thing drop, began referring to herself as Jackie again, and started sucking face with this cheerleader named Rae Parker who transferred to our school the last half of junior year because she screwed up at her old one.

  Rae Parker didn’t come back to school in September because she earned a stay up at The Brattleboro Retreat for pills and more pills, but at least Jackie learned a few things about herself.

  Trans? Nope. Raging bull-dyke? You betcha.

  I held the flashlight in my fist right about shoulder height and scanned the mounds of mulch. I didn’t think Mitch would be desperate enough to be doing the nasty in the stinky piles, but you never knew with kids from the hill towns. I grew up with more than a few who would be desperate enough to screw certain farm animals if they had an itch that needed scratching.

  Hey, sheep can be damn cute.

  There was nobody there.

  “The woods it is,” I said.

  “Seriously?” whined Danny. “Are we really that desperate to get stoned?”

  We all looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  “Alrighty,” I said. “Lions and tigers and bears.”

  We weren’t inside the dense forest more than twenty feet before I realized something wasn’t right. Mitch’s lone pickup truck should have been a clue. There were always people at The Toke and Blow. You didn’t have to be toking and you didn’t have to be blowing to hang out there. It certainly wasn’t the weather keeping everyone away. We were only into the middle of October, and it wasn’t that cold. Sure, if you were from Florida or some other warm place, you’d be freezing your ass off, but we lived here. We were acclimated to the temperature.

  Still, I felt weird and a little spooked, like we were walking through gravestones instead of trees.

  “Hello?” Danny yelled out into the woods.

  “Um, yeah,” grumbled Jackie. “Like a good-natured greeting ever stopped anyone from screwing.”

  Danny ignored her. “Anybody?” he cried out again, and I started feeling like we shouldn’t be in the woods at all.

  “This isn’t worth it,” I blurted out, hoping that either Danny or Jackie would take the bait, but it didn’t work.

  Danny cupped his hands around his mouth. He was just about to shout out one more time when a big blur burst through the dying foliage and almost knocked him over.

  The blur was Mitch Finnegan and Patty Parkman, running hand in hand, but not in a skipping-through-the-roses way. They both looked like they had just seen the Donkey Man.

  Local legend.

  Different story—one you don’t want to be in.

  “Jesus,” Mitch cried when he saw us, barely even slowing down. The beam of my flashlight caught their faces. There were tears flowing down Patty’s cheeks in streams. “There’s a dead guy back there. I didn’t do it,” Mitch hollered as they both kept on running, disappearing the way we had come.

  Danny held his hand up and did a cursory royalty wave, most likely checking Mitch out as he melted into the woods. “Bye,” he mouthed. Then, “I hate Patty Parkman.”

  Meanwhile, Jackie was far more focused on what Mitch had said. “A dead guy? Really?” She punched me in the arm and said, “Tyler, come on. Let’s go see,” and pushed on.

  I’ll never know what made Danny and I follow her deeper into the woods, but we did. Partially it was inbred hill-town boredom, and part of it was that we couldn’t just leave if there really was a dead guy in the woods.

  Could we?

  Twenty feet farther in, with my gut twisting and turning because I felt as though something was really off, we came upon a large downed fir, roots and all.

  I scanned it with my flashlight.

  Weird.

  The crown of the tree had been sheared clean off. There were more cracked branches and broken trees around, and there were pine cones everywhere.

  “What happened here?” I murmured.

  Jackie wasn’t deterred. She stepped up and over the felled tree. “Come on,” she said. “If someone’s dead, I wanna see.”

  Danny snorted. “This from the girl who got us all detention because she wouldn’t dissect a frog.”

  “Yeah, so,” she shot back. “Frogs are all oogy and stuff.”

  Danny and I looked at each other and shrugged because she had a point. We both climbed over the tree and joined her on the other side. Jackie’s mouth hung open. There was a large clearing of broken trees and branches. Something had happened here.

  Something bad.

  “Look,” said Danny. The edge of my flashlight caught a weird pile on the ground. Thankfully it wasn’t a dead body. It was something else entirely. Danny walked over and picked it up. He was holding a large, old, leather bag with rope ties on top. It looked like one of those artsy backpacks that all the college kids down in Northampton wore to try and look cool.

  He opened it up and reached inside.

  “Are you shitting me?” he cried as he pulled his hand back out. “Look at this.” Clutched in his fist was a plastic bag and in the bag was about a quarter ounce of exactly what we were looking for. We all gathered around and stared at it. There were even rolling papers inside the plastic with some sort of brand name I never heard of before. They were called ‘Jolly O’s.’

  We were all so stunned by our absolute amazing luck that the first time we heard the distant moan, we almost didn’t notice. The second time the groan was louder. It wafted through the trees accompanied by a weird smell that didn’t seem to fit into the woods at all.

  It fit into my grandmother’s kitchen.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “Who cares,” quipped Danny. “Let’s get baked.”

  “What’s that smell?” asked Jackie. I couldn’t place it either. If anything, I would have said it smelled like peppermint and gingerbread—like someone was baking.

  I pulled my flashlight up to my shoulder again and scanned the swath of fallen trees, slowly turning in a circle, my heart pounding a little harder than it should for a seventeen-year-old boy. When I had almost completed the circle, my flashlight fell on the source of the noise and the smell. We all yelped.

  There was a figure on the ground, huddled into a ball like your body makes after you twist your knee playing soccer and somehow think curling into yourself and popping your thumb in your mouth will make it all better.

  It was Mitch Finnegan’s dead guy, but he wasn’t dead. He was probably drunk out of his mind because he reeked of what we were smelling—some sort of weird schnapps, as if peppermint schnapps wasn’t bad enough to make you ralph after the third or fourth shot.

  Personal experience.

  Again, different story. Also one you don’t want to be in.

  Danny looked at the guy and then at the bag of weed in his hand, then back at the guy again.

  “Finders keepers,” he screamed like a gleeful little girl, and dashed back toward my pickup with the old leather bag in one hand and the grass in the other.

  The guy on the ground moaned. The sickly sweet smell hung in the air like morning fog.

  Jackie looked at me and shrugged. “He’ll sleep if off.”

  The beam of my flashlight washed over the old drunk one last time. “If you say so,” I said. “I ho
pe a bear doesn’t eat him.”

  “Then the bear would be drunk, too,” she snorted and we both laughed.

  3

  THE NEXT MORNING, ten minutes after detention started, the skies opened up.

  I was supposed to be working on the detention assignment that Ms. Balsam had put on the blackboard, but my pen had frozen in my hand. From my vantage point in the middle of the classroom I could see that others had stopped writing, too.

  We all stared out the window, transfixed, like we had never seen snow before.

  Well, I guess we had, but not in the middle of October.

  “What’s that?” said Lilly Scalia. Lilly got caught in the girl’s bathroom with a cigarette so that’s why she was locked up with the rest of us. Her question was a valid one. It was snowing outside when there shouldn’t be snow. The puffy floating flakes were so out of place that no one had an answer for her.

  Ms. Balsam snorted in a piggish way. Everything about her was swine-like. She had little piggy shoes on her little piggy feet, and her little piggy face was flat with a wide nose and beady eyes. She collected all of our cell phones at the beginning of detention with her little piggy hands and put them in her desk drawer. That way we couldn’t text, or play games, or anything like that while we were being punished.

  It probably floated her little piggy boat to have that sort of power over us.

  She waddled over to the window and stared out at the snowflakes as they started to come down faster and faster.

  “Seriously,” said Lilly again. “What is that?”

  “It’s snow, you idiot,” snapped Jackie. She was sitting up in front of the classroom so that Ms. Balsam could keep her little piggy gaze on her and her douchebag mouth. Jackie was wearing a baseball cap and her arms were crossed over her chest in some sort of act of defiance.

  Danny was sitting behind me. “It’s snowing,” he said, restating the obvious.