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Snowed Under
by Troy Lynn Pritt I thought that I was in an Army sleeping bag, lying on the ground in a tent. I could see the canvas walls of the tent and its ridge pole. I saw Jodie Stokes and Hamp Brown, my buddies in Nam, dressed in Army fatigue uniforms. They told me that I was in Sergeant Hammil’s tent, but that was all right. He was out on a mission and wouldn’t be back for four or five days. Before then a chopper could come in to evacuate me. After a long time, was it one day or two days, I became conscious that I was in a hospital bed and the people were doctors and nurses, not my buddies from Vietnam. Had a chopper come for me and I didn’t remember any of it? I was moved out of ICU and into a hospital ward. The nurses and doctors told me that I had come through open heart surgery with flying colors. I realized by then that I was not in Vietnam, that it was a much older me who was recovering. During the daytime, some family members came to my bed. At first, I only understood some of the things they were saying. Nighttime was a whole different world. The walls and windows and ceiling would turn into a gigantic snow bank. The clock on the wall became a circle in the snow bank. The erasable message board became a rectangular outline in the mass of frozen white crystals. After a while these would be replaced by a park bench lodged in the snowy ground. Two women were seated on the bench. These were white stone statues attired in Grecian robes that left one shoulder bare. The statue women were talking. Occasionally, other statues walked by. I would wake up shivering and cold. In the daytime everything was becoming clear and lucid. Every night the dream would return. About the third night, I noticed that one of the women walking past the bench was carrying a basket. It appeared to be filled with giant snowballs the size of melons. The following night I went closer to have a look into the basket. What I saw were the heads of humans. I heard one of the women on the bench say about one of the “snowballs”, “I heard that he finally succumbed today. He put up a hard fight.” About then a nurse woke me out of my dream. “What are you doing, kneeling at the foot of the bed, staring down at the floor?” The next day my wife, my daughter, and my two sons came to visit. During the visit, for a few moments, my wife seemed to become one of those Grecian statues on the park bench. My daughter was the statue walking by with a basket full of snowballs. One of the snowballs was me! During their visit, there was an undercurrent of contention. Their whispers were about my business, my money, and my will. My two sons have not seen my will, but they assume that the lion’s share of my estate and the control of my business will go to them. They will be surprised! That night the snow bank returned; the nightly pageant resumed. Just after the woman with the basket full of snowballs strolled past the white stone Grecian ladies, the snow bank began to collapse. There seemed to be an avalanche of snow. I was trapped inside the avalanche and I could not breathe. Everything became dark. “Where is my oxygen hose?” I was being lifted off the bed and onto a gurney. “Is he dead? Did you hold the pillow long enough?” “He isn’t breathing and I don’t feel a pulse in his neck. Is that dead enough to suit you?” The voices sounded like my sons! I tried to call out for help, but there was no air in my lungs and no sound would come out of my throat. “Hey, where are you going with that patient?” I recognized the voice of one of the male nurses on duty at night. “His family is transferring him to the Cedarwood Cardiac Care Clinic. We brought the Clinic’s van to transport him.” “Patients aren’t transferred in the middle of the night. If he were being transferred, I would have a half dozen sets of papers to fill out. There is no one in the offices now. I’m calling Security.” “Here are the transfer papers. You can read them while I help to push him out to the van.” By then the elevator door was opening. The door closed and we were going down. When it opened again, we obviously did not go directly out the front door. I could tell that we were going down corridors, turning into connecting corridors, and going through doors. Then we came to what must have been a large, walk-in refrigerator. The two men rolled me into the refrigerator. I could hear them taking off clothes, which they threw onto my body. Maybe they were discarding their medical workers’ disguises. The nurse probably told hospital Security, his supervisor, and then the police about two men who had taken a patient out of the hospital on a gurney who said they had a van outside waiting to transport the patient to a Cedarwood Clinic. No one looked for me in the hospital, in a refrigerator. A day and a half passed before my body was discovered. By then it was covered with a thick layer of frost. The police were called and eventually the funeral home was called. The undertaker who came to pick up my body swore a few indecent oaths when he saw my half-frozen corpse and realized there was extra work for him. The day of my funeral I would have laughed if dead men could laugh. There was a record snowstorm for December. The reading of the will was postponed by the lawyer for a week because of the weather. I wish that I could be a statue in a corner of his office when my will is read. No sooner had the thought occurred, than I found my “self” in a white marble bust of Socrates. It was on a wooden pedestal table in a corner of my lawyer’s office! The day arrived when my family and the officers of the company came for the reading of the will. It was brief for a legal document. “I Devon Liam MacGruder, being of sound mind declare this to be my last will and testament. “My estate includes all the shares of MacGruder Brass Fittings, a private corporation which owns the business. I hereby give and bequeath half of these shares to be divided among all of the company’s workers in proportion to their years of employment. I give and bequeath the other half to be divided evenly among the chief accountant, the sales manager, and the plant manager. My daughter and two sons are each to receive $50,000 from the estate. My wife is to receive the remainder of funds in the estate in addition to the two automobiles, the family home, and the lake shore cottage.” When the lawyer finished reading the will, my two sons leaped to their feet with an avalanche of protests. “He can’t do that.” “We’ll sue to protest the will. He wasn’t in his right mind, what with being sick.” The lawyer responded. “If you sue, you will have to use your own money to do so. I doubt if any lawyer would take the case on speculation. Your father was aware of the seriousness of his heart condition. He discussed the possibility of his death with the company officers and with me at various times over the past year. This was after both of you were offered a chance to go to work for his company and learn the business from the ground up. Neither of you lasted more than a few months before quitting.” “Who wants to work all day among riff-raff and get dirty and sweaty?” “$50,000 is a pittance. We were receiving more than that from him every year, for different things we wanted.” At that the sons stormed out of the room and went into the reception area where there was coffee and bottles of water. They were alone, or so they thought. The statue was against the wall of the reception area and I could hear them. “You idiot! You told me that we would inherit the company if he died.” “I thought we would.” “We should have left well enough alone and hoped he would recover.” “How could we have guessed that he would cut us off and leave us with crumbs? He was always generous to us while he was alive, always reminding us to save enough for a rainy day.” “I shouldn’t have listened to your hare-brained scheme.” At that moment another man stepped into the room from a supply closet. “My name is Detective Frank Flaherty of the Centerville Police Department. I would like for you two young men to accompany me to the police station. We need to discuss your ‘hare- brained scheme’. Your father did not die of natural causes. The medical examiner says that he was smothered. His body was stolen in the middle of the night by two young men and hidden away in a walk in refrigerator at the hospital. “From what I heard just now, you had a motive, even though it was mistaken. The medical workers’ attire that was found with the body had a few hairs caught in the material. When the two of you provide us with samples of your DNA, we can compare it to the hairs we found on the uniforms. We will also put you in a line-up. We’ll see if you are identified as the two men seen by the nurse who was on duty when the body was stolen. “ My wife and daughter were leaving the room and approaching the reception area. When they saw my sons being led away in handcuffs, my daughter gasped; my wife sobbed inconsolably. I wanted nothing more than to hold them, but the scene disappeared from my sight. |
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