Bad News

41

The holiday special the girls wanted to watch on television this evening, The New Adventures of the Virgin Mary and the Seven Dwarfs at the North Pole, started at eight, but had barely gotten the dwarfs out of F.A.O. Schwarz inside a shiny new Beetle—bright red—when the power went. “Oh hell,” Viveca said. Now the girls would have to be entertained.

Around them in the fresh darkness, the house purred almost as much as normal, because the backup generator automatically kicked in when the power went out, but the television set was not part of that grid, which had been installed years ago, at a time when the house was not full of young children. Today, the decision might have been different; too bad.

Matt, the hunk from security, had gone home at six, so it was Hughie, a gruff, stout, older man, a former New York City policeman who preferred to keep himself to himself, who came from the now-dark barn, grumpily following his flashlight beam. “Phone’s out, too,” he a

Viveca had already lit the Coleman lantern and was carrying it by its looped handle as she stood at the top of the stairs, watching Hughie come up. At this point, there was no other light in the house, though they did have candles and flashlights, as needed. “I’m sure they’ll plow us out in the morning,” she said as he came in and took off his pea jacket to hang it on one of the wooden pegs on the kitchen wall near the door. “Do you know Uno?”

He gave her an exasperated look; but then, all of Hughie’s looks were exasperated. He said, “Do I know I know?”

“It’s a game,” Viveca told him. “It’s a lot of fun, really.”

“We play it whenever the electricity goes out,” Virginia explained. “It keeps us entertained.”

“You don’t have to play if you don’t want to,” Viveca threatened.

Hughie looked alert, waiting to be given the same option, but not a chance. The more the merrier with Uno, and Hughie was the closest thing they had at this point to a man around the house, so this was not a time when he could be permitted to keep himself to himself. This was a time for Hughie to play Uno.

They all trooped into the living room, Viveca leading the way with the Coleman lantern, Virginia and Vanessa and Victoria following, Hughie grumpily bringing up the rear, and while Viveca hung the lantern from the hook at the bottom of the chandelier that they always used in these circumstances, the girls took the whatnots off the side table and brought it out to center it under the light. Hughie, catching on, helped bring over the chairs, while Viveca got the Uno deck from the drawer in the end table beside the sofa. Then they all sat down, explained the rules of the game to Hughie three times, and began.

The first hour, the game was, in fact, a lot of fun for all concerned. Hughie showed an unexpected competitive streak, and his grumpiness turned out to be a kind of bearish good nature. Not for the first time, Viveca was actually getting to know a member of the security staff while playing Uno during a blackout.

The second hour dragged a little, though nobody would yet admit it. Outside the large windows, the storm whipped around in darkness, lashing the mountainside. It was pitch-black out there, so nothing could be seen, but the storm could be heard as the wind swooped past the house and occasionally sleet rattled against the windows. Inside, they were warm and dry. When one of them had to go to the bathroom, they had water. To occupy themselves, they had Uno. And later on, for Hughie, there would be the guest room.

The third hour, the girls began to yawn, and Hughie had started to show a certain absence of mind that might suggest he’d now plumbed the depths of the complexities of Uno and was ready to go on to some other challenge, but nobody wanted to go to bed, and there was nothing else to do, really, but sit in a circle under this one light. If they were going to sit here anyway, they might as well play Uno.

At midnight, Viveca said, “That’s it, now. Time to go to bed.”

“Just one more round,” Vanessa said, as one of them always did.

“Hughie will be the last dealer,” Virginia a

“That’s good,” Victoria said.

Once again, they’d outnumbered her. “Just the one round,” Viveca said, as though it were her idea.

“Good,” Hughie said.

They were midway through that last round when Victoria exclaimed, “Look at all those lights!”

Everyone turned toward the windows, and now all at once there was something to see out there. It was some kind of vehicle, absolutely festooned with bright lights in red and white and yellow, and it was climbing slowly but inexorably up the mountain, toward the house.

“How can it do that?” Viveca wondered. “Nobody could drive up that road tonight.”

“It’s a snowplow,” Hughie informed them, from his years of experience as a New York City policeman. Rising from the table with a certain evident pleasure to have done with Uno even before his final deal, he went over to one of the windows—not the yellow-paned one—and said, “It’s a snowplow coming up to the house.”

“But they don’t do that,” Viveca said, standing and walking over to also stare out the window at the approaching lights. “That looks like some kind of big highway department thing. Jerry from the gas station plows us out, tomorrow, when the storm’s over.”

“Well, here he is,” Hughie said. “I better go see what it’s all about.”

“We’ll all go,” Vanessa said, dropping her cards on the table and getting to her feet.

“Definitely not,” Viveca told her. “You girls are not going out into that storm.”

“Oh, Mom, yes,” Virginia said.

“We’re just going outside the door,” Victoria said.

“Absolutely not,” Viveca said.

42

I’d like a cab like this,” Murch’s Mom said.

“Be tough for the customers to get in,” Murch suggested.

“I wasn’t thinking about the customers,” Murch’s Mom said.

The two of them were warm and cosy in the cab of Cleveland’s top sand spreader, plowing the twisty, steep road up to Thurstead. Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny were undergoing who knows what agonies behind them in the open bed of the truck, but that was them, and anyway, they’d be making a bunch of money out of this trip.

The snow was heavy and wet, which, from their point of view, was good. The sand spreader didn’t care how heavy anything was, but a lot of ice on this steep road might have given it pause.

There was nothing out there so far on this mountain but the snow-piled road, the snow-laden wind, and the snow-burdened trees all around them; beyond the multicolored lights of the truck, there was only darkness. But then, far upslope, Murch’s Mom saw a faint glow, like a dim light left on in an empty attic, seen up the long and creaky stairs. “I guess that’s it,” she said.

Her son was concentrating on the road; mostly on finding it, under all this snow. “You guess what’s what?” he asked, turning the big wheel this way, then turning it that way, goosing the gas, easing up, goosing the gas.

“There’s a light up there,” Murch’s Mom said. “What you call your ghostly little light.”

“Good,” Murch said. “I’m glad they got a light, because that’s what we’re go

The trio in the back of the sand spreader couldn’t see anything at all, and they weren’t even trying. They’d all huddled as close as possible to the cab of the truck, to be in its lee, where the wind was maybe one mile an hour less vicious and the snowflakes maybe seven per minute less frequent. They’d brought hotel blankets to wrap precious items in, but they had started by wrapping themselves inside the blankets, so that they now looked like snow-covered bags of laundry that the driver from the cleaners had forgotten. Every time the truck jolted, which it did all the time, it made them bump into one another and the metal cab wall behind them.