Bad Weather

He had seen and was to see things more frightening than the yeti. Weaver had called it the yeti, though many years later, lingering at the door to David’s bedroom, where inside his wife was reading aloud to their son from a book of world folklore, he would learn that yeti were creatures out of the mythology of the Himalayas, and so what he had seen on the Rapid City air force base one December night in 1943 was something else.

Long before the yeti, Joe had seen the university students at the bonfire swearing their fire oaths. He was still Joachim then, still a German, and too young to understand the meaning of many of the words the students disavowed as they hurled books into the flames: Impudence? Decadence? There was something, too, about sexual activity, and that he did grasp, but he kept his face arranged in the same expression of incomprehension. His mother was right beside him, and he didn’t want to alert her to what he had learned in after-hours conversations with his older brother.  

He grasped, too, that the entire display, the conflagration, the brass band blasting noise into the air, the students’ ecstatic pronunciations of the oaths, was actually pitiful, so much smaller and sorrier than the spectacles in Frankfurt and Köln he had overheard his parents speaking about, their voices floating from up from the kitchen to the room he had once shared with his brother Walter. This was very much a village affair, Joe thought, nearly at the point of gloating. A laugh began to bubble up in his throat when one of the students turned from the bonfire and saw him. The student’s eyes retained, for two moments, a soft and open look of delight at the fun he was having, launching books with his full-strength into the blaze, books like the ones he maybe hated and resented having to read for school. But then the eyes caught up to his awareness of Joe’s small watchful presence at the margin of their ritual, and iced over. His lips parted a little, and he took a step backwards, away from the bonfire, and that was the last Joe saw before his mother hauled him away. He was certain if she hadn’t, the student would have kept coming, his mouth widening, jaw unhinging; he would have lifted Joe off his feet and into his mouth and swallowed him whole. That, or tossed him like another book into the fire.

Not long after that came the days of gravel. Gravel rasping under the boot treads of boys, who lilted out in their sopranos a song about how very soon their knives would drip with blood. From inside the belly of his home the words were hard to parse. But by the outhouse, they arrowed into his ears, purified by the cold night air, and the urine froze inside him. In a matter of days he would shove the face of one of the marchers, a neighbor who had cheered Joe’s goals at soccer even when they played on opposing teams, into the gravel of the road on the way to school. Joe’s fingers would be braided through the boy’s hair, and when he pried back the boy’s head his soft cheek would be pockmarked with dozens of bright red spots.

Less frightening to him than the blooming of violence like mold in the village was being sent away. On the other side of the sea waited Walter, whose most recent letter home Joe kept tucked inside a spare pair of trousers at the bottom of his trunk. It was his favorite of Walter’s letters, recounting a ticker-tape parade honoring Howard Hughes for having completed a three-day flight circumnavigating the globe. Walter and his wife had left Harlem at dawn to make their way down to the Battery ahead of the crowds, and they had claimed for themselves an ideal vantage point, catching a glimpse of the mayor and even the aviator himself. Harlem, the Battery: these words were alien to Joe, but the Atlantic was drawing him nearer to uncovering their meaning, to holding them inside his mouth. He worried, of course, about his parents, his sister and brother-in-law and their son. He worried about how they’d make money, now that their butcher shop had been seized. He worried about his nephew growing up pale and scrawny because his parents couldn’t afford to feed him enough meat. But he was comforted by Walter’s letter inside his trunk, and the jewel of New York inside the letter, glinting in the dark.

Inside the ship with him was David, after whom he would name his son. David was older, and looked after Joe even when they were both wrung out by the waves. He joked, when not retching into a bucket, that on the bright side, he was losing his beer belly. American girls liked firm bodies, he had heard. Joe said he didn’t think girls anywhere in the world were particularly excited by beer bellies. David disagreed; his mother liked his father’s, often rubbing her hands over it, laughing. She said it was for good luck. For five days they writhed in their bunks, their throats burning with acid, the smell in the third-class chambers unspeakable, but they both had good luck. They were going to die ordinarily, unlike their parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, and one ancient shrunken grandmother, David of congestive heart failure in 1998, Joe of lung cancer in 2012, old men on firm mattresses.

The radiologist showed him, on the x-ray, what looked like several cirrus clouds. Joe, stooped in a paper gown on the metal table, its cold gnawing into his ninety-year-old flesh, saw how the cancer had gathered like bad weather in his lungs. It was what would finally kill him, he understood, after all the thwarted attempts. There had been the suspicious cells scattered across his prostate in his eighties, the car accident in his seventies, the armed robbery of his store when he was nearing retirement, when he had thought, his face pressed into the linoleum, a masked man’s boot flattening his ear, You’ve gotta be shitting me. (He had become that much of an American.) And before all that, what had come before all that. Each time he asked the question, Now? And now he knew: Now.

Ten weeks after the yeti lurched up the hill from the runway, at first barely distinguishable from the snow drifts until it drew nearer to them and its terrible outline locked into sight, Joe’s plane was shot down during his third and final mission. He saw the creature again in his mind when the skin of the B-17 was punctured by flak and, as though sunburned, began to peel back. Denuded, it went into a spin that had the ignorant grace of a leaf falling. He saw the yeti and the black thrall of its eyes. One of the lieutenants pounded at the handle of the escape hatch until he and another were sucked into a square of blue. Joe, squatting over the opening to the sky, was held in place by centrifugal force and the yeti’s pupils, widening across his field of vision, until there came a kick from behind and he was through, patchwork land roaring up to meet him.

The man who kicked him had told him once, “Your helmet is your church.” Then, blinking, “Or, I guess, your temple.” Joe pulled the ripcord. Within his helmet, the fear clattered, deafening: They’ll see immediately who you are. It was stamped there on his dog tags, the star of David. He thought of tearing them off, but the wind held his hands in place.  

But in the stalag the guards ignored them all. To the guards, he was just another airman. Here, of all places, at last, he was American, and the only enemy was boredom. That and hunger. But the hunger, like lice, was shared, and sometimes abated together, their fingers scooping sweet clumps of powdered milk rations directly into their mouths. The boredom was particular to each of them, and so was the method of its relief. One man declined walks and card games, in lieu of lying in his bunk and crafting in his mind another world layered atop their own, and by the time they were nearing the end of their long march he knew its topography, flora and fauna, political systems, mythologies, heroes and legends. He knew the pattern of the wallpaper inside the banquet hall of the royal palace, and when the English liberators appeared in the doorway of the barn they’d been sleeping in, he told them he didn’t want to go home.

Occasionally horror would punch holes through the boredom, in snatches of conversation Joe’s ears caught despite his desire to lose his old language entirely. The guards recounting to one another one bright afternoon, as they lingered out of the sun in the threshold to the barracks, things they’d done to women in the towns they’d sacked. Rumors among the airmen, more dreadful for their wispiness, of what the other camps were like. Chin up, his fellow prisoners said, when the topic of family arose.

There was the sense, after the war, as he puffed back to his original weight and then some, as he partnered with David to open the store, as he courted Rosa, as they raised little David, that his other life went on, hurtling along its track, and if he returned to his homeland there it would be, the splintering bunk, the mildewed odor of his uniform, the vacancy in his gut chewing him awake. The relentless imagining of the fates of his family members, his skull filled with scenes so foul it seemed they would penetrate his cellular walls, weep from his skin, poison the ground.    

Joe kept the man still living this life mostly subdued, although sometimes he blistered forth. At the restaurant, say, where he took his wife for her fortieth birthday dinner, which little David pouted through, offended by the presence of carrots on his plate. “Three more bites,” Rosa instructed him, so quick to compromise, though the boy had never had a single taste of hardship. Watching David pick up a single carrot and nibble gingerly at its tip, grimacing, Joe had a brief but vivid fantasy of lifting his son from the chair and flinging him against a wall. Under the table, his hands gripped his knees. In that moment, and some others, he had nothing but hatred for David. It was an airborne toxin that suffused all the chambers of his head, concealing everything else, the way his son would quickly glance Joe’s way for affirmation before he headed through the doors to school or to the dugout during Little League games. The way he had, as an infant, slept with one leg sticking through the slats of his crib, as though testing the air.

Joe would have liked to be able to claim, as an old man, that there were never any beatings. But he could certainly make the argument, were he ever challenged to do so, that it could have been much worse. He kept most everything tamped down. What resurfaced more insistently than anything else—even than his mother or his sister—was the yeti.

He had been warned about the wind, shortly after his arrival to Rapid City for radio operator instruction. “You’ve heard Chicago is windy,” said one of his bunkmates, a local boy. “It’s got nothing on South Dakota.”

The wind’s persistence and velocity felt personal. It taunted them. After a long stretch of howling around the barracks, it might fall quiet and send its gentler lackey, the Chinook wind, warm and wet as a kiss, to draw them out. But this was only a set-up, and as soon as they left their shelter the real thing came roaring back to scorch their tender faces. What had they ever done to the wind?

Warnings or not, it was impossible for Joe to prepare himself for the prickle of his nostril hairs as they froze upon inhale one winter morning, or for the sight of the sky sagging with snow until it gave up and lowered itself to the ground. For the sense of certainty that, when the world vanished behind a whiteout, it was never coming back.

After a blizzard, white shrouds lay stretched across the universe. No creature moved, though the sun, refracted, was another enemy, frying his eyes. The men tunneled through snow drifts to breakfast, to training, their voices hearty, but they must have understood, as he did, Joe thought, that their heartbeats were just tiny throbs of protest, easily swallowed by the lifeless white infinitude.

Not lifeless. The base was so crowded they held classes twenty-four hours a day, soldiers swarming in and out of buildings at dawn, in the dead of night. It was on their return from a two a.m. Morse code lesson that Joe and three others heard moaning from the runway down the hill. Snow fell softly, fat and friendly; they’d learned to feel gratitude for precipitation when it came in this form. Other times it needled into noses, lips, whatever was left exposed.

The moaning stopped and wind rushed in to fill the silence. Then it started up again. Joe had never heard a human being make this sound, but that’s what he assumed it was—a human in a state of extremity from grief or pain.

His classmates must have thought so, too. One—Weaver, whose name was a particular challenge for Joe, whose stubbornly German teeth and lips kept wanting to pronounce it Vee-fer—cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello out there,” he called. Despite the strangeness of the moment, Joe mentally filed away the gesture, the string of words, for future mimicry. It struck him as very American.

More moaning, closer.

“What is that?” Weaver muttered.  

They stood at the lip of the hill, squinting into the white-lashed dark. Now came the creak of snow under heavy footfalls. Before them, the insensate flurries swirled, coalesced, clotted into sensate form.

It walked upright, albeit with difficulty. It walked as though laden with something. Joe would be reminded of the gait first by little David, a toddler in an unclean diaper, and later by himself, after prostate surgery. Its movements were awkward in a way that was nearly funny, and initially he believed it was a joke, a trainee dressed in an animal suit playing a prank.

A question lay at the back of Joe’s throat, a very American one: Hey, what’s the big idea? But when he peered over the edge of the hill for a closer look, the words sunk to his entrails. It was climbing the snowy slope toward them and he could see it was taller than a man. And a man, especially one cloaked in an animal suit, certainly couldn’t have moved that way, loping up the ridge with long, swinging arms that ended in meat-hook claws.

Weaver took a step away from the edge. “Fellows,” he said quietly. As one, they crept backward. The thing reached the top and pulled itself erect. It was covered in damp white fur, a white less pure than that of the snow, dingy in places, a spot over the right ear matted with something that had to be blood, dried to a blackish paste. The lower jaw jutted forward in an underbite like the one his family’s dog had had. Joe and his brother and sister had all teased him for it, the dog, whose name was Fritz; sometimes they just called him Underbite. Now Joe wondered, What had happened to Fritz? Could he possibly have been relocated with the rest of his relatives, his snout pushing dampness and comfort into their hands through the long train ride? Or had soldiers just shot him and thrown him into a ditch? Or—this seemed to Joe best of all—had Fritz found a way to escape during the chaos of last-minute packing and found a new life with a gang of other liberated pets, sleeping and playing in the weeds along the Rhine, their true animal nature at last uncovered?

Joe could feel the safety of the barracks at his back. The thing just stood there, watching them, panting through its underbite. With each squeak of snow beneath their feet as they continued creeping backward, it seemed likelier that the thing would be startled into attacking. Its eyes were not unlike their own, its irises blue, punctuated by small black pupils, but there was no feeling in them, only focus.

Looking into the yeti’s eye, he saw the pupil was a portal; it was the mouth of a well. Joe gripped the stone halo and peered over the edge. The well’s long throat coughed up a stagnant lake smell and voices: those of his mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, and his shrunken grandmother. The voices were sweet and calm—they hadn’t been harmed at all. They spoke gently, tendrilling around him. He grew, for the first time since he had come to South Dakota, warm and sleepy. And that was fine. He had been mistaken. He didn’t have to fly in the bomber over the familiar green geometries of his old country. He could just go to sleep and see them all again.

Distantly he heard a sound like fingers snapping. It went on, each snap a snare tugging him up and out of the well. The cold knifed its way back under his wet wool coat. He turned his head with the slowness of a dream and saw that one of the base security officers had materialized beside him and was firing his rifle at the thing. He fired all eight rounds, and he couldn’t have missed every time, but the thing went on standing there. Small winds pressed upon Joe from all sides as several of his superiors rushed past, out of the barracks, shouting. Their words were muddy, hard to discern, as though he’d only just arrived and hadn’t learned English at all. When he turned back to the thing at the top of the hill, there was only a void, and flurries falling through it.

The security officer told their superiors he had spotted a wolf approaching the camp and was trying to scare it off. As he spoke he stared at the students, each of them in their turn, with such a steady gaze that Joe was never certain whether a wolf was what the man really had seen.

The yeti was hardly mentioned again after that night. They talked instead about baseball, wives and children, coffee rations, Kraut-killing. But their eyes went again and again to the windows of the barracks, watching for something moving in the snow.

It never came back. Some kind of shared hallucination, Weaver posited once, and they grunted or coughed or snuffled, dredged the requisite rough sounds out of their bodies. Had each of them been lured, as Joe had, to the lip of the well? And what had called out to them from inside?

But it was another question that pounded at him from within, holding him in wakefulness through the night. A question that came in two parts, like the phases of a heartbeat:

If that thing exists,

Then what else is out there? 

Joe had once thought himself equal to the task of revising his most fundamental beliefs. Treat others with kindness and it will be returned to you. The community will catch you if you fall. The bonds of family cannot be broken. He had withdrawn his faith from such doctrines when presented with the conflicting evidence, and the reward for these efforts was that he could call himself a wise man.

But now he saw he knew nothing about the world. He would have to revisit principles even more elementary. Monsters aren’t real, for instance. For out there, in the white waste that smothered all life, walked a thing that absorbed gunfire, that with a look could disintegrate a mind.

If that thing exists—and it did, Joe only grew more convinced, despite the security officer’s testimony and the silence of the others—then there were no rules governing nature, at least none that their minds would ever fathom.

Being held prisoner provided a respite, in a way, from this revelation. Joe had no choice but to structure his time exactly as the guards dictated, especially once they left camp and began the long march east from Mühlberg, hunger mounting until it devoured all thoughts, even ones of the yeti.

And afterward, he could see no other way to conduct his life but according to those rules he had once taken for granted. But he knew better. He’d only been half-retrieved from the yeti’s stare. In dreams, its blue eyes burned through the slats in his closet door behind which it hid, or leered over David, pinioning him in his crib. In waking hours, the memory resurfaced and spread across his inner field of vision, leaching peace from the sweetest moments.

There is no sense in anything, Joe thought, as he came to in the aftermath of tearing the telephone out of the wall. He stood gripping the plastic receiver in one hand, the base unit dead on the table, trailing its electrical guts. How had he arrived here? The act of destroying the thing was lost in a whiteout of rage. He’d been negotiating with a vendor, he remembered that, and then it had become clear the guy was trying to screw him, and then—

David was watching him, the comic book he’d been paging through forgotten. Then he was backing away slowly, with the small soft steps of a baby animal.  

There is no sense in anything, he thought in the hospice, fluid bubbling through his lungs, because the David who was here in the room with him was not the one he wanted. It was his old friend and business partner, the David who’d never ended up losing his beer belly, the one who’d been dead fourteen years. His son was on the way, a nurse had told him, but how long ago Joe could not have said. Time didn’t run forward but rather into itself, like water down a drain.

Time was pulling him back now, back to Rapid City and the percussion of hailstones on the roof of the barracks, the assault of the wind. The yeti’s eyes were open and widening, the black pupil welcoming him back inside.

Then a shape appeared out of the dark and resolved itself into solidity, an oval with distinct features: the face of his son. It was hard to recognize at first—it was older than he remembered. Maybe, Joe thought—not for the first time, not that the thought had ever smothered his rage—he had done wrong by David. The face was so worn.

David asked someone in the room if Joe could hear him. Then he turned back toward his father. His lips parted but Joe was being pulled away, too far for the words to reach him. A sense of ease soared through him all the same. The yeti was gone, though snow continued to pour from the sky. Joe stood squinting into it, trying to seize upon a break in precipitation, to see beyond it. He wondered what else was out there.