Snow Burn Read online

  Snow Burn

  by

  Joel Arnold

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Joel Arnold on Smashwords

  Snow Burn

  Copyright © 2010 by Joel Arnold

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  * * * * *

  For Paige and Zachary

  * * * * *

  Snow Burn

  * * * * *

  Chapter 1

  For the sake of argument, let’s say –

  You’ve just escaped a sinking ship. There’s one more space available on your lifeboat. A child struggles nearby in the frigid water. As waves pound your boat and the wind howls around you in the darkness, you stretch out and grab the child’s hands, pulling him from the water. But as you lift that child from the wreckage into the safety of the boat, you catch a sudden glimpse of his future.

  You see:

  A life of crime. Lying. Pain. Stealing.

  Pain.

  Murder.

  Pain. Pain. PAIN.

  Now you have a choice.

  What will you do?

  Will you still save the child?

  Or will you let his hand slip from yours and watch him drown in a cold, unforgiving sea?

  Chapter 2

  Let me tell you why Vince Nguyen isn’t just an ordinary jock. For one thing, he’s Cambodian. You don’t see many Cambodians playing football around here. Not a lot of Cambodians named Vince that I know of, either.

  For another thing, he’s got…

  Wait.

  Take Castle High’s last football game of the season.

  Vince played defensive end. He’s one of those guys who really gets into the game. He howls, hoots and grunts with the best of them, hurls himself at the opposing players as if he actually enjoys the bruises and the crunch of bones.

  We played Seward that night, the school from the other side of town. Fans from both schools packed the bleachers, screaming, cheering, clapping, stomping their feet, teetering on the edge of their seats. We had the ball with two minutes to go. All we needed was a field goal to tie the game.

  Jim McGraw, a guy with a jaw the size of a backhoe, kicked the ball. We held our breath as the ball sailed end over end toward the goal post. For a moment it looked like it might squeeze by like a pregnant woman in a turnstile, but the ball had other ideas. It veered to the right, missing the post by inches. The crowd either groaned or cheered, depending on which side of the stands they occupied.

  Seward took possession.

  I stood near the end zone with the rest of the Castle High marching band, gathering my sticks and snare drum, getting ready to play our cadence and march out of the stadium.

  It was a chilly fall night. My fingers were stiff with cold, my knuckles dry and blue. I opened and closed my fingers around my sticks, trying to keep them limber and warm.

  Seward’s center snapped the ball. The quarterback pump-faked and handed off to a running back. He ran five yards before a pile of our guys took him down. People in the stands gathered their blankets, half-full popcorn bags and soda cups, getting ready to leave.

  Seward threw a short pass to a receiver. He sprinted for twelve yards. Another first down.

  It looked grim.

  The marching band lined up somberly in formation on the track that surrounded the field. We waited restlessly for the sound of the drum major’s whistle.

  But Seward did a reckless thing. A stupid, reckless thing.

  With sixty-five yards to go for a touchdown – they passed.

  It was a long bomb down the center of the field. To the quarterback’s credit, it was a thing of beauty. Their wide receiver – the one who scored the first TD of the game – ran hard down the field, and you didn’t have to be good at geometry to see that the trajectory of the ball and the runner were about to meet perfectly only ten yards from the end zone.

  An amazing pass. Exceptional.

  But there was one problem.

  Vince Nguyen.

  He sprinted alongside the Seward wide receiver, matching him step for step, an almost perfect mirror image except for the color of their uniforms and the color of their skin.

  At that moment, it seemed that one of two things could happen.

  Either Vince would block the pass, or Seward’s receiver would make a beautiful catch and fly into the end zone from sheer inertia. Either way, we’d lose.

  But –

  At the last possible moment, Vince Nguyen leapt. He plucked the ball off the receiver’s fingertips, landed on the trampled grass and started running in the opposite direction.

  The crowd went wild. Cups were flung, popcorn dumped on heads and expletives burst over the field like gunshots.

  Vince ran past one stunned player after another. But Seward wasn’t going to let him run the field unchallenged. A few of them hastily regrouped and waited for him down field.

  He ran like a freight train.

  The marching band forgot all sense of decorum. We whooped and yelled and jumped and danced and threw expensive instruments in the air like confetti. Even our band director, Mrs. Norris, pumped her meaty fist in the air, the flap of loose skin hanging under her bicep waving like a flag on Independence Day.

  He ran toward the end zone, his head down, the crazed smile visible beneath his face guard growing larger with each step.

  It was then that I noticed Vince ran with a slight, almost imperceptible limp, as if one of his legs had locked up on him.

  He kept coming. He dodged Seward’s center. He spun around Seward’s quarterback, nearly falling.

  But he didn’t fall. He remained upright. In motion.

  The bleachers shook. Shouting, crying, maniacal laughter rained down from the stands.

  He kept coming.

  A wild blur.

  Twenty yards.

  Ten.

  There was one more threat between him and the goal.

  Seward’s star running back, a big guy with an abundance of speed and muscle.

  The running back dove at Vince. A perfect dive. Well aimed. Well timed. Textbook.

  Except that he caught only one of Vince’s legs.

  And that leg came off in his arms.

  Vince spun and teetered, nearly falling, but he caught the trampled turf with his free hand and pushed himself upright.

  There were cheers. Screams. Exclamations of horror and laughter.

  And Vince, with one leg left, hopped into the end-zone for a touchdown.

  The smile on Vince’s face almost split his helmet in two.

&nb
sp; The running back held the prosthetic leg, turning it over and over in his hands.

  People in the stands quickly realized that Vince hadn’t been torn limb from limb – there was no spurting blood, no raw muscle poking out from his uniform.

  Vince laughed and rolled on the ground, hugging the ball. His teammates crowded around him and lifted the one-legged wonder high into the air.

  The Seward running back jogged Vince’s prosthetic leg back to him and shook his hand, a dazed look on his face.

  Vince held the leg high in the air like a trophy.

  The crowd – from both sides of the stadium – roared.

  And that was how Vince Nguyen became part of school legend.

  That was when I realized he wasn’t just an ordinary jock.

  But something happened later that year, something that made Vince more than a legend.

  At least to me.

  Chapter 3

  I got to know Vince shortly after the big football game, when he heard me practicing on the band room’s drum set after school.

  See, when I drum I lose track of the world around me. Time stands still. Everything outside drums ceases to exist. I didn’t notice Vince until he grabbed a ringing crash cymbal, muffling the vibrations and startling the hell out of me.

  “I know you,” he said. “You live two blocks down from me.”

  I glanced around the room, getting my bearings. It was just the two of us. “Oh,” I said.

  “You have your own set?”

  “Yeah.” It was an old Yamaha set I inherited from my brother when he went off to college. I’d been teaching myself how to play, listening to great drummers like Buddy Rich, Neal Pert and Keith Moon, trying to imitate their styles.

  “I play guitar,” Vince said. “We should jam sometime.”

  My b.s. detector was on heightened alert. Was this a joke? Was there a herd of jocks standing just outside the door, laughing it up while the star of the team screwed with the band geek. I tried to read his eyes.

  He frowned, waiting.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “I guess.”

  He nodded. “Cool.”

  I remained leery.

  But the next weekend, Vince Nguyen, star of the Castle High football team, lugged his Gibson guitar and Peavey amp over to my house. As soon as he stomped on his distortion pedal and played that first bone-jarring chord, I knew he wasn’t joking around.

  We had a blast.

  We played for over three hours. My little sister watched us with her hands over her ears and a big smile on her face. We played until my dad came down into the basement wincing.

  “Hate to break it up, boys,” he said, “but that’s all your mother and I can take today without checking into the funny farm.”

  My ears rang joyfully for the rest of the day.

  Turns out we shared the same taste in movies, too. I turned him on to Alfred Hitchcock, and he introduced me to the blood-soaked subtleties of classic drama like Friday the 13th and Halloween.

  When we passed each other in the halls at school, he’d say, “Hey, brainiac,” and I’d answer, “Hey, ya dumb jock.”

  At first, his other friends thought I was being a smart ass. You could almost see the testosterone pulsing through their brains, their simian necks and shoulders tensing, readying to dish out a severe pummeling.

  But Vince said, “Cool it, guys. He’s joking. Besides, we are a bunch of dumb jocks. Be proud of it.”

  They were cool after that. Some even gave me a nod in the halls when I passed by.

  Guess we all make snap judgments about people. Sometimes you’re right. Sometimes you’re wrong.

  Vince and I shared a social studies class, but we had assigned seats on opposite sides of the room. One day, our social studies teacher, Mr. Sweeny, walked slowly up and down the aisles, his hands clasped behind his back. He stopped at the row of windows overlooking the student parking lot. He stared out at the empty blue sky and asked, “If you had the chance to go back in time and kill Adolph Hitler when he was a child, knowing that in doing so, you’d potentially save millions of lives, would you do it?” He turned around to face us. “Would you murder a child?”

  There was an almost universal “Well, duh!” as students nodded and said “Of course.”

  Everyone except Vince.

  His hand shot into the air.

  “Mr. Nguyen,” Sweeny said. “You’re shaking your head.”

  “I couldn’t murder a child,” Vince said.

  “Not Adolph Hitler? Knowing the atrocities he’d commit?”

  Vince shook his head. “Nope.”

  Mr. Sweeny paused, and then asked, “What about Pol Pot?”

  The hint of a smile ran across Vince’s lips. He stared at his desk and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Because as children, they’re innocent.” He looked up at Mr. Sweeny. “And I couldn’t kill someone who’s innocent.”

  Mr. Sweeny smiled. “But Vince, we’ve all heard how your mother and father escaped Cambodia. How they watched their brothers and sisters die under Pol Pot’s regime. You wouldn’t want a chance to change all that?”

  Vince said, “Pol Pot wasn’t born a monster. He was born like you and me. Like everyone here. It was the world that changed him. The world turned him into a monster.”

  “But knowing that he would become a monster,” Mr. Sweeny insisted.

  “No,” Vince said.

  “But – ”

  “No,” Vince said. “The only way to overcome evil is through acts of goodness. Not through revenge.”

  Mr. Sweeny raised an eyebrow. “Much easier said than done.”

  Vince shrugged. “That’s no excuse.”

  Sweeny looked at him a moment without saying anything.

  The bell rang.

  Even after the bell stopped, even after its echoes died quietly in the hallways, there was a moment when no one moved, no one spoke. And then all at once the spell broke. The entire class rose from their seats and headed out the door.

  I waited for Vince, but he walked by me without seeming to notice I was there. I watched Mr. Sweeny sit down behind his desk, lean back in his chair and rub his eyes as if they were full of sand.

  Chapter 4

  Look, this isn’t really about football or tricky ethics questions.

  This is really about the January weekend Vince’s parents went to Las Vegas for the weekend, leaving Vince alone at his house.

  Of course when parents are gone, plans get made, and the first thing we planned was a caffeine soaked slasher fest.

  Meaning –

  – we’d stay up all night Friday and Saturday drinking Mountain Dew and Coke and watching movies like My Bloody Valentine and Prom Night.

  Of course, my mom and dad didn’t need to know that Vince’s parents were gone, because they’d never go for that. They’d insist Vince stay at our house. Then our caffeine soaked slasher-fest would be a bust. For one thing, we couldn’t watch those movies because they scared my sister. Plus, my folks didn’t want me hopped up on caffeine after seven o’clock.

  Plus, Vince had his own fifty-inch flat screen plasma TV with surround sound speakers mounted on the walls of his bedroom. He even had two incredibly comfortable recliners with cup holders. It was almost better than going to a movie theater.

  “How’d you afford all this stuff?” I’d asked him the first time he showed it to me.

  He winked. “By giving my special Cambodian rubdowns to my mom’s old lady friends.”

  “That’s sick!”

  Vince flicked me hard on the shoulder with his middle finger. “What’s sick is the way you look at my mom.”

  “Ouch!” I said, rubbing the spot he’d flicked me. “What’s sick is the way you look at your mom.”

  We both cracked up.

  Then Vince shrugged. “I earned it mowing lawns.”

  “Would’ve been easier giving your special Cambodian rubdowns.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  So anyway, I asked if I could
sleep over at Vince’s that weekend, only lying a little about how Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen thought it’d be really nice if I stayed for the weekend. You know – so they could teach me about the Cambodian culture and all that. Luckily, my dad was too deep into the newspaper to give it much thought, so everything was cool.

  I called Vince to tell him it was a go.

  “Stay put,” he said. “I’ll come pick you up. Bring warm clothes.”

  Even though Vince lived only a few blocks away, he always drove to my house just because he could. I was seventeen, but I still didn’t have my license. I had my permit, but I nearly drove my family off a cliff into the Mississippi River the year before. If it wasn’t for my mom grabbing the wheel and jerking it hard to the right, and my sister screaming, and my dad screaming even louder, we’d all be somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico by now, making another round through some fish’s digestive tract. I guess you could say the whole incident turned me off of the fast track to vehicular independence.

  I shoved a sweatshirt, thick socks and long underwear into my duffel bag in case we decided to go tubing down the hill in Vince’s backyard. Last week, after it snowed half a foot, we built a ramp at the bottom, and had a blast flying wildly through the air and landing on the fresh, crisp snow. I put on my winter coat and ski mask, gloves and boots, and waited outside on the front step.

  Snow floated lazily from the sky, adding a fresh loose layer to the packed-down snow that covered most of the town. Icicles hung from trees and eaves and car bumpers. Our next-door neighbors, the Byrons, had yellow patches all over their front yard thanks to the Chihuahua they let dash outside to relieve itself. He raced out now, shaking like a sack full of wasps as it squatted down to pee. Poor thing. I wondered how far I could throw him.