A WINTER’S TALE
A Grasshopper and Cricket Adventure
Warren Greenwood
13 Freese Road
Ithaca, New York 14850
(607) 319-4046
[email protected]
http://www.warrengreenwood.com
26,000 words
A WINTER’S TALE
A Grasshopper and Cricket Adventure
Warren Greenwood
Copyright 2007 Warren Greenwood
Winter is trying to kill you.
Garrison Keillor
A WINTER’S TALE
1
From The Grasshopper’s Casebook:
The Case of the Sinister Snowman
Jesus.
It seems so pretentious and stupid to write that. Like I’m Sherlock Holmes or
Batman or something.
Oh, well. What are you gonna do?
It’s good that I write this stuff down.
It can’t be published of course. At least as long as Cricket and I are alive. Maybe
it can be published after my death, when Cricket is an old woman living in seclusion in
her creepy mansion like Greta Garbo.
(She peers over my shoulder as I tap away on the laptop. “A cat lady!” she shouts
– an exuberant teenager.)
Anyways, it’s good to get this all straight.
The television news covered the story, of course, like all Grasshopper & Cricket
adventures, and they got most of it wrong, of course, and there’s inevitably going to be
huge gaps in their narrative. And there are a lot of intimate details in my account
(“Whoo-hoo!” says Cricket) that the TV news would not be privy to.
And the Future Reader should understand, that although I am a player in this
narrative, or more accurately, Cricket and I are players in this narrative, I wasn’t a party
to all these events. I pieced together the full story, including the scenes that Cricket
played, somewhat later. The Reader will just have to roll with my acting as the
Omniscient Narrator in those parts of the story that I don’t appear.
And perhaps, someday, in the future, in another century, long after I’ve gone to
Over-Hero Heaven, this will be another quaint, colorful, faintly unbelievable story from a
bygone era…like tales of cowboys and Native Americans and zeppelins and steampowered fighting suits on the prairie and so on.
So, Future Generations:
Enjoy.
A WINTER’S TALE
2
PRELUDE
I’ve always hated winter.
Our story opens in winter.
In a small, quaint, snow-covered village in Upstate New York with a long, nearlyunpronounceable Iroquois name, sitting on the northern end of one of the Finger Lakes –
the long, pretty lakes in central New York gouged out by the retreat of the glaciers during
the last Ice Age.
It’s December. Nearing Christmas. And it’s snowing. Big fat snowflakes. It’s
like being in a snow globe.
And we’re outside a bank.
We see a guy in snowman costume out front of the bank on the sidewalk. Ringing
a little gold bell.
He’s standing before one of those red Salvation Army-type collection buckets on a
red metal tripod and flanked by a sign reading “Caring is sharing! God bless you!” and
surrounded by a cluster of midgets in harlequin-colored elf costumes clutching giant redand-white striped candy canes.
The elves are handing out regulation-size candy canes to smiling, laughing, applecheeked children bundled up in thick winter clothes.
It looks like a Currier and Ives print.
Maudlin, insufferable Christmas music is wafting from hidden speakers.
Happy, happy, happy.
But there’s something about that snowman…that snowman guy is…weird.
Oh sure, he looks like a standard issue comical holiday season snowman – round
and bulbous and amusing. He wears a snowman suit covered with some sort of movie
special effects material, white latex or foam rubber or something. And he’s got the
regulation tall black hat and bright orange carrot nose and big black buckle boot galoshes,
as well as fat Mickey Mouse mittens, a long colorful scarf of dark green-and-bright red
plaid, fluffy purple earmuffs and a large yellow broom.
But he’s wearing these weird arctic snow-goggles like that Captain Cool guy, or
whatever his name was, in the old Sixties Flash comics, giving him a neo-punk look.
And his outfit seems…a bit too…heavy…like it could stop bullets…and when he
moves there’s a slight Robocop whine like muffled servo-motors, and even his fluffy
purple earmuffs look like some sort of weird walkie-talkie unit.
And his broom looks too big…too bulky…like a howitzer or something…
A WINTER’S TALE
3
And, up close, his mouth seems a bit weird… There’s a row of little black
speakers like lumps of coal -- a clever idea -- but somehow they look…creepy…like a
Mexican wrestling mask…a Day of the Dead skull…
And then the Snowman and the elves abandon their post and enter the bank…
It’s an old-fashioned bank. Quiet as a library. All polished brass and mahogany
wood grain patterns and gray-and-white marble flooring and artificial green plants.
The people standing in line (a bit bored) are amused by the appearance of the
Snowman and the elves. They laugh. Children clap their hands with glee. “The
Christmas Song” plays on the bank’s sound system.
A bank guard appears to order them out. The guard is a tough old bird –
humorless, pot-bellied, a handlebar mustache and a neo-Texas Ranger uniform – a
suspicious, irascible old fart.
The Snowman wags his head and says, “Whoa! We’re misbehavin’! Sorry,
Officer! We certainly didn’t mean to trespass on the bank’s sacred property! We shall
depart posthaste!”
“And Peaseblossom, why don’t you offer the officer a Christmas treatie…?”
One of the elves saunters up to the guard and offers him a candy cane – which
suddenly explodes with red-and-green gas, enveloping the old boy, who goes down like a
harpooned walrus…
The elves are suddenly a flurry of activity.
Some strap on colorful gas masks and quickly gas the tellers and the people in
line with their candy cane guns. Others pull out real guns from their backpacks -- .357
Magnums and Ingram guns and sawed-off shotguns and so on…
More guards arrive…
But the Snowman upends his big yellow broom and cradles it like a tommy gun
and fires a big weird blue-white blast out of the end of it at the unfortunate guardians of
capitalism. The shimmering ray flies through the air, distorting it like a heat mirage…
But it is not heat…
It is a cold ray.
Really cold.
Somewhere near absolute zero.
The moisture in the air coalesces around the guards…and ice… thick frost and
glittering ice… begins to form all over their bodies – they’re encased in a shell of it –
they’re starting to look like snowmen themselves – and they drop their frozen guns in
pain…but the metal adheres to their hands…
They cry out…fall to the floor…stagger stiffly away like Boris Karloff in
Frankenstein.
A WINTER’S TALE
4
One intrepid young security guard manages to raise his gun to fire…
But the Snowman aims his cold ray broom…and an ice wall coalesces out of the
air between the elf gang and the guards… Bullets slam into the ice…there’s the crash
and bang of gunfire…a smell of cordite and gunpowder…diamond chips flying…and
finally, the young Turk of a guard, frozen like an ice cream confection, gives up, turns
and staggers out of the bank.
With the guards dispatched, the elves nimbly vault over the teller’s booths and
begin helping themselves to large amounts of cash.
The Snowman and a contingent of elves approach the great circular steel bank
vault. The vault door is one of those big, round, old-fashioned ones, big as a small house,
intricate as a Swiss watch, tons of perfectly balanced steel, a Jules Verne contraption.
The Snowman says, “Man! That’s craftsmanship!”
The vault door has been swung open for the day. Only the bars of the day gate
block the vault itself.
The Snowman sets the ray on its coldest setting, down near absolute zero, and lets
it fly. The ray sparkles and glitters, the air shimmers, fog condenses filling the bank, the
metal bars crack and groan…
And the sudden differential in temperature, between the now near absolute zero of
the bars and the warmer surrounding steel, degrades the metal. It buckles and snaps…
Happy larcenous little elves appear, wearing special cold-resistant space suits.
They whack at the frozen bars with sledgehammers and rip them off with crowbars.
Happy larcenous little elves in furry parkas and mittens trundle up the bridge and enter
the vestibule of the vault and begin helping themselves to the money. They load the cash
into colorful shopping bags festooned with Christmas trees and snowflakes.
The Snowman sings, “It’s beginning to look like Chrrissst-massss…!” in a nottoo-bad tenor.
A short time later, the Snowman and his Elf Gang exit the bank with their illicit
withdrawal.
More elves drive up in a convoy of big white snow tracker vehicles.
“Ahh… My faithful Little People and their recreational winter vehicles!” the
Snowman says.
The gang climbs aboard.
Police (small town police, in no way equipped to deal with this insanity) arrive,
but the Snowman, hanging off the side of a snow tracker, lets them have it with his freeze
ray.
The glittering wave hits the police cars, transforming them into super-cooled
walk-in freezers. The police, who manage to exit them, side arms drawn, are hit with the
gelid wave. Snow condenses out of the air, tumbling on them, and they are transformed
A WINTER’S TALE
5
into snowpersons, themselves. They convulse, cry out in pain, and are driven back,
dropping their weapons -- the metal now too cold to touch -- to fall to earth and roll
around in the snow, convulsing like rabid dogs.
“Careful, officers…” quips the Snowman. “Looks like a cold front is comin’
through! Brrr!! Wouldn’t want to get a nasty case of frostbite and lose them toes…!!”
The snow tracker machines fire up with a grinding roar and the Snowman’s gang,
laughing and hooting, drive through the picture postcard village and out of town.
As they hit the country, a few pathetic police cars and state troopers converge and
give chase through the snow-covered hills.
But the Snowman’s gang comes to the edge of a thick, snow-covered field and…
just drives off…into the snowy hills toward a distant wood. (Easily done, as they are
driving big snow tracker vehicles with great tank treads and Dr. Seuss pontoon skis.)
The Snowman’s criminal convoy continues across the snow-mantled fields,
laughing merrily, if evilly…
But, suddenly, a police helicopter appears overhead, tracking them…
The chopper shines a great beam of light down upon them in the descending early
winter night. A bullhorn barks from the sky, ordering them to halt.
The Snowman’s convoy rolls merrily on.
The helicopter fires down at them. Machine gun bullets raise a spray of snow
across the field, slamming into the white snow tracker machines…
And the back end of one of the snow trackers opens like a steel lotus to reveal an
antiaircraft gun-sized freeze ray with the Snowman at the controls. He hits the firing
lever and fires a great, glittering cold ray up at the copter.
Ice begins to form on the chopper’s rotor blades. The flying machine becomes
unbalanced, and dips lower and lower until it crashes unceremoniously into the snowcovered fields below, sending up a plume of white snow, an explosion of yellow-red fire
lighting up the field. Two officers are injured, one seriously, the other critically.
And the Snowman’s gang escapes into the darkening hills…
Later that night, on a wintry country road, a squad of the Snowman’s nasty little elves
waits with several big eighteen-wheeler rigs. The trucks are painted with a logo reading
Ice Industries. The woods are stark and black. The snow glitters like crushed diamonds.
It’s cold.
Suddenly, the snow tracker machines roar up out of the dark, snow-carpeted
fields, up onto the snow-packed road, creaking and grinding in the cold, and up onto steel
ramps emerging from the flanks of the big trucks. They fold up like Japanese robots as
they come, until they are just small enough to fit…
The elves close up the trucks with a crash of cold steel and clattering chains. The
Snowman climbs into the cab of the lead truck, gives a cheerful thumbs up, and the
convoy drives off into the night.
A WINTER’S TALE
*
*
6
*
Much later that night: The trucks arrive by separate routes at an industrial park on the
outskirts of a small suburban Upstate New York town.
It’s a dark winter night. The sky is indigo blue with cold bright stars, and a
gibbous moon paints the Frank Lloyd Wrightesque buildings silver.
This is the Snowman’s corporation.
A long, oblong, steel sign gleams in the cold moonlight reading: ICE
INDUSTRIES – NORTHERN LIGHTS ENTERPRISES.
A WINTER’S TALE
7
ACT I
Our scene changes now to my farm, Locustdale, in Locust County, New York, just south
of the beautiful, green, progressive college town of Forest City, New York, home of
Riddell University.
Forest City is a small, rural town. If you were to draw a ten-mile radius circle
around the city, it would encompass over one hundred and fifty waterfalls. And it’s a
weirdly cosmopolitan city given its small size, owing to the proximity of Riddell
University, a world class Ivy League university, perched on a mighty hill overlooking
Cayuga Lake, the longest of New York’s beautiful Finger Lakes, it’s campus graced with
numerous sublimely beautiful waterfalls and gorges. Forest City has a wonderfully
vigorous arts scene, all out of proportion to its small size. The residents are progressive
to the point of being sweetly nutty about it. They eat a lot of tofu.
Locustdale is a beautiful old farm with one of those beautiful old 19 th century
farmhouses with all the psychedelic gingerbread trim and a big wrap-around front porch
and a couple hundred acres of rolling meadows and wooded hills.
It’s also the secret headquarters of the entomoid masked adventurer, the defender
of the farmland and small towns and villages, the Rural Over-Hero, (Your Friend and
Humble Narrator) the Grasshopper.
Locustdale has a score of ancient barns converted into hangers and garages for all
my absurd, over-the-top weaponry and vehicles: the Hoppercar and the Hoppercopter and
the hovercraft and the jet skis and my tank and so on. I’ve even got an intercontinental
missile hidden in a silo. And a limestone cave to rival the Batcave hidden behind a
waterfall.
(The equipment was designed and built by my Team Locust armorers, Walter
Warkentin and Kenny Kroll, the respective Dean of the Engineering School and Chair of
the Industrial Design School at Riddell, where I am a professor of art under my real name
of Paul Triphammer, and was financed by a fortune in Kodak stock left to me by my great
Aunt Coral, but that is another story…)
Cricket, my beautiful teenage sidekick-cum-girlfriend, and I were in the big rambling
kitchen of the beautiful old farmhouse, all smooth buttery wood and silver-and-copper
pots and pans.
Cricket’s real name is Zoë Peak.
A WINTER’S TALE
8
She just celebrated her 19th birthday. She’s an art student at Riddell.
Zoë is about five-foot-two, a heartbreakingly beautiful nineteen-year-old girl.
Slender, but somehow muscular and voluptuous. With short chestnut brown hair in a
neo-punk cut, two strands hanging down on her forehead like feelers. I’ve never been
able to figure out what color her eyes are. Indigo-violet, perhaps.
And she’s not my Young Ward. She’s my Significant Other. Living with me.
Fucking her professor and Over-Hero Mentor.
Yes, I know.
Not exactly ethical educational or over-hero behavior.
You’ll just have to live with it.
I love her more than I could ever put into words.
Looking into her eyes is like falling down a well of love.
Zoë was sitting poised on the edge of the big buttery central wooden kitchen table, her
perfect thighs forming a heart.
There was a smell of some sort of Vegan something-or-other on the stove. Lentils
or green spinach pasta or something. Zoë is a devout Vegan. Vegetarian fare makes me
flatulent. Absolute hell when you are beating up an over-villain. I eat some meat, mostly
fish and fowl. Zoë says I am a monster.
I was boiling water for tea and complaining about winter.
Doing an extended rant about winter, really.
Whining and complaining about how I absolutely loathe winter – how I hate it
when it gets down toward zero and everything hurts…the entire environment hurts.
Touching snow with your bare hand hurts, the air hurts, touching metal hurts. Your
fingers and toes hurt…a lot. Your nose hurts. And when the cold enters your stupid
parka hood (which makes you look like fucking Quinn the Eskimo or Nanook of the
Goddamn North or something) because you had to roll up the fur lining so you can see –
so you have some fucking peripheral vision – the cold hits you like Vlad the fucking
Impaler is driving a nail into your forehead.
I mean, if you were left outside for the night and couldn’t get inside and you
didn’t have your stupid winter gear neo-spacesuit on, you’d die. The actual environment
would kill you.
Zoë took the tea I handed her and said, “You always make a big deal out of
everything.”
“A new snowfall is really pretty,” she said leaping off the table with a graceful
animal athleticism. “Besides, it’s really warm today; it’s in the twenties!”
She switched on the big wide-screen TV in the kitchen with a remote and started
channel surfing.
“Snow is ice-nine,” I said. “Snow is white death.”
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9
But Zoë wasn’t paying any attention.
She had just turned to a local news broadcast featuring jerky video footage of
some guy in a snowman suit and a troop of colorful little elves exiting a bank and loading
big bags of money onto Dr. Seuss-issue snow tracker machines.
Zoë squealed with delight. “Omigod!!” I don’t believe it!! Look at this!!”
I wandered over to watch the Snowman and the elves driving off with their loot
down the street of a charming little Upstate New York village.
“…local bank in Canandaigua robbed by a bizarre but seasonably-attired
costumed criminal and a gang of midgets dressed as elves…” a local newscaster was
intoning.
“This is totally interesting,” Zoë said. “He’s like a Batman villain, only
different!”
“Umm,” I said, blinking at the improbable images on the screen. “Jesus…this is
weird.” Then, “Well, I guess this is in our territory, huh?”
“Well, I guess.”
I thought about it for a moment and said, “Jesus God. I wonder if we attract these
idiots…”
*
*
*
Our scene changes to another small town in the Mohawk Valley in Upstate New York
called Carver, New York.
The sky is gray.
The snow is coming down fast in thick wet flakes. The wind is blowing it
sideways, obscuring vision. Cars have their lights on as if they were driving in fog. The
radio is predicting twelve inches.
The town is covered in snow. It’s like a Currier & Ives print. The snow lies on
the rooftops like icing on innumerable cakes. The frosting on the bushes looks like a
miniature Alps, little foam-covered hills on a table top miniature in a movie. Cars are
buried in snow, covered with thick mounds of the stuff, like giant powdered sugar
confections.
It’s cold. Somewhere in the teens.
And in the charming little Main Street U.S.A. downtown area, someone has
turned on the white Christmas lights that spiral through the trees like winter fireflies.
And somewhere in that charming little Main Street U.S.A. downtown, one of
those squared-off armored trucks is pulling away from a bank.
It rolls down the charming street (paved with red bricks) and turns off into the
suburbs (full of beautiful ornate 19th century houses) heading for the highway.
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It’s a pretty place in its horrible, gelid way: a world of powdered sugar
confections, snow on the roofs and turrets of the ornate 19th century houses like thick
white frosting. Big three-and-four-and-even-six-foot icicles hang from the rooftops and
gables of the fairy tale houses, looking like some kind of giant plastic holiday
decorations. There are sepia-colored feather trees and swirling Jackson Pollock thorn
bushes with bright red berries popping against the white of the snow.
It looks like the whole world has been frosted with powdered sugar.
And the snow is sparkling.
Hundreds of thousands, millions of sparkles.
A billion, billion sparkles everywhere.
The snow on the sepia-colored trees looks like white electricity.
The armored car turns a corner – a blind corner on an icy winter road, obscured
by fragrant green pines laden with thick white winter frosting – and, suddenly, it smacks
into – an iceberg!
A giant hunk of ice, big as barn, shimmering and coruscating and just sitting there
in the road like it’s waiting for the Titanic.
Ice is hard.
Like a diamond.
The armored car hits its brakes too late, screeches and slides, smashes into the
berg, slides down its scintillating side, and crashes into the snow-laden Christmas trees.
There is a smell of pine and a fresh, clean smell of snow -- and a sudden smell of
burning rubber and diesel fuel.
A moment later, elves in winter camo appear from nowhere – out of the green,
snow-laden pines and the gray Jackson Pollock bushes and the sepia feathered trees…
They haul the dazed driver (a beefy, mustachioed guy) and the shotgun guard (a
young militaristic-looking kid with a bad haircut) out of the wreck at gunpoint, and
handcuff them to a tree.
And then, suddenly, a snowman standing in someone’s yard comes to life…
waddling over to the armored van and pointing his big, somewhat high-tech looking
broom at it…
The broom emits a blast, the air shimmers and dances, a glittering ray slams into
the side of the armored truck.
The Snowman calls out cheerfully to his elves, “Stand back, Little Persons! I’m
employing real gas giant temperatures, here!!”
The truck was cold to begin with, but now it’s seriously cold. The absolute zero
of space.
The metal buckles and cracks (from the differential in temperature between the
merely cold and super cold parts of the truck).
And a moment later, an elf in a white parka, drives a white, tank-treaded battering
ram out of a dead end street. The battering ram spirals out of the machine like a giant
screw. The elf smashes the ram into the side of the armored van, splitting it open.
A WINTER’S TALE
11
Elves in protective space suits and parkas appear to steal the money within. They
haul out the cash in big white canvas bags with giant dollar signs painted on the side.
The Snowman’s now familiar big white Dr. Seuss snow machines descend on the
scene, roaring down the steep hill of another little dead-end street of charming snowcovered houses (big wrap-around wooden porches, beautiful quaint second floor porches,
gables and turrets, covered with thick white snow, flanked by feathery sepia trees and
green pines) to stop right in front of the shattered armored truck.
The elves load the cash onto the Snowman’s snow tracker vehicles.
The Snowman hums a jolly holiday tune.
It appears that Crime will have its way…
But then, the Snowman looks up and reacts to – they all look up and react to – a
distant…humming noise…
And they all see…coming down the winter road…turning a corner…just making
it out through the falling, blowing snow…
A weird white vehicle arriving…
It looks like it was designed by the late, sainted Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, all bubble
tops and free-flying forms – almost a dragster look, high in the back, low in the front, a
Big Daddy bubble top, triangular shape, big back wheels, flanged fender guards… And
it’s big as a fucking tank, in fact it has tank-like caterpillar treads, and a big stylized Art
Deco locusts head on the grill with machine gun mandibles.
And it’s coming fast, kicking up big plumes of snow, bearing down on them…
“Aw fuck,” says the Snowman, as the thing’s co-axial machine guns open fire,
raising a spray of snow…elves being knocked flat by rubber bullets…bullets bouncing
off the Snowman’s body armor…
*
*
*
That was us of course.
The Grasshopper & Cricket.
We wore winter-wear: special white, winter camo outfits. Mine, a full-face white
bug mask, big bulbous bug eyes, a white, armored, striated bug suit. Cricket in a
fetching, white, skin-tight, latex and Kevlar and Nomex armored costume and white
winter ski-mask – covering her full face – just her haunting indigo eyes and full lips
appearing – and over this she wore a stylish, white, big-lapelled coat and go-go combat
boots.
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We roared down the road, the winter Hoppercar’s tank treads crunching and
spraying the snow, the road coming up at us fast like a long endless strip of sepia and
white taffy, the tire tracks musical bands, rushing patterns of white and sepia and gray
like the abstract animation in the Toccata and Fugue sequence in Fantasia.
We pulled to a clanking, screeching stop in a spray of snow. The Big Daddy Roth
bubble top opened like a glass lotus, and Cricket and I stood ready to do battle. Our
breaths steamed in the frozen air.
I couldn’t resist making a scene…posing heroically in the open dome of the
Hoppercar. “I think you took something that doesn’t belong to you, Gentlemen,” I said.
“Jesus. You are an idiot,” the Snowman said.
By this time, the cars on the street were pulling up, stopping, turning around and
clearing the area. It was clear that things were going to get weird.
The Snowman looked at us incredulously and said, “You’ve gotta be kidding.
You’re a fucking insect over-hero! Not the goddamned Ice Weasel or something! Don’t
you know bugs hibernate in the winter?! Or whatever the fuck they do! Go to Florida or
something!”
In answer, Cricket and I leaped from the vehicle ready to do battle. (And we lost,
so I can’t tell you how glad I am that nobody captured this debacle on his or her home
camcorder.)
Cricket attacked first. She doffed her big stylish coat revealing the fetching skintight white latex and Nomex armored suit beneath and went after the vile little elves. She
flipped across the road like the gymnastics prodigy that she is and waded into the little
weasels.
(I suppose it could seem sort of mean, beating up the Little People, but Cricket, at
five-foot-two is pretty petite herself.)
She waded into the elves, employing obscure martial arts and looking like Emma
Peal on the old Avengers TV show, knocking the colorful little reprobates around like
tenpins and kicking up clouds of white powdery snow. There were wild confusing
flashes of red-and-green-and-white in the powdered snow.
While Cricket was occupied with the Elf Gang, I concentrated on the Snowman.
I had hoped to take him down easily.
I unslung the white multi-rifle strapped to my back. But the Snowman was
already firing at me with his high-tech broom, sending a glittering ice-blue cold ray my
way.
My rocket pack kicked in, and I shot up in the frozen air, avoiding the shimmering
ray, which hit a huge, ancient Upstate New York tree, like something out of Middle Earth,
encasing it in a sudden sheath of coruscating ice…
I came down from my rocket hop, kicking up a cloud of snow. And we went
through that dance a few times, the Snowman shooting his cold ray all over the place, and
me leaping through the winter air like my insect namesake.
On a descent, I maneuvered the multi-rifle to my shoulder and fired a round of
rubber bullets at the bastard.
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13
He shrugged them off like mayflies. His snowman costume was clearly more that
decorative. It was armored. I suspected that even if I switched to real ammo it wouldn’t
faze him.
I stole a quick glance at Cricket – to make sure she was OK.
She was in mid-battle, knocking about a score of elves; dodging crimson gas
blasts from their candy cane guns. (The fighting was too close for them to use their
magnums and Ingram guns. Some of them were wielding crowbars and big wrenches,
and frankly, I was worried, but she seemed to be holding her own.)
I hit a lever on the multi-gun, changing its function, and fired a Taser dart at the
Snowman.
The Taser hit his armored hide and delivered a jolt of electricity. But, apparently,
his suit was insulated. He staggered a bit, the dart zapped and sparked, but it had no
significant effect.
“Yo, Bug Man!” he called. “That was lame!!”
And he fired another blast of his wretched cold ray at me.
I rocketed up into the air, again. Hitting painfully on some snow-covered
branches overhead. Taking the blow on my back and shoulders. Filling the air with a
cloud of snow.
I said, “Aaaghuh!” and came down hard, tumbling, barely catching my balance, in
a crystal blaze.
(Another quick glance to check on Cricket. Seen through a crystal cloud. She
was leaping into the air as a mob of rushing elves crashed together below her.)
I needed to take out that damned freeze ray.
I tried a surprise.
On another leap, as the Snowman fired his ray at me, I unhitched my Jack Kirbyissue power truncheon from my applicability belt, and, as I landed, blasted forward,
straight at the ridiculous bastard.
It was the Old Surprise Visit – I moved in on him much faster than he had
planned.
On the way, I anticipated back with the truncheon and brought it down on his
broom-gun, smashing the thing to fragments.
“Jesus!” he yelled. “You goddamned idiot! Do you have any idea how much that
thing cost?!! You are a seriously annoying motherfucker!!”
He backed away, kicking up white powdery snow, crystals flashing, and swung
the remainder of the device like his own truncheon, clipping me in the shoulder and neck.
My grasshopper-styled shoulder/neck armor took most of the blow, but it hurt like
hell, and sent me reeling.
But I didn’t lose momentum. I rebounded quickly, came at him fast and whacked
the broken device with the power-truncheon, knocking it out of his mittened hands.
That’s when he surprised me. Reaching out with a big fat mitten and grabbing the
power truncheon and releasing a big electric jolt through it.
A WINTER’S TALE
14
I was blown backward, my hand stuck to the electrified truncheon, burning me
through my armored glove, and I fell backward into a snow bank, hitting my head on a
pine tree and momentarily blacking out.
I came-to to see the Snowman removing his bright orange carrot nose. “Eat
carrot nose, Insect Guy!” he said. And hurled the bright orange cone at me with a nice
overhand pitch.
Some instinct whispered to me that which was to come, and I rocketed out of the
snow bank in a flying leap…as the plastique nose bomb went off with a deafening roar
and a sudden red explosion of fire and shattered pine and twisted hunks of formerly
parked, snow-covered automobiles.
The Snowman played rough.
Even Cricket and the elves momentarily ceased their battle, freaked-out by the
blast. Flaming shrapnel and snow flew everywhere. Elves dived for cover. Steel
smashed into my Kevlar-armored Hopper-suit.
But I kept on going on my on my rocket-leap, banked, and descended, leg
extended with an armored bootie.
I got him in the head.
He went down in a cloud of snow, losing his black top hat and a few black coals
from his microphone mouth. It was gratifying.
But he was back on his feet in an instant, with an astonishing agility that belied
his massive bulk, and he slammed back at me, servos whining.
I blocked the blow with an armored forearm and belted him back.
His Snowman helmet was armored. But my armored gloves have a sort of hightech brass knuckle cestus system – with cunning gyro-hydraulic cushion to protect the
bones in my fingers and wrists.
I knocked the bastard about a few times.
But he gave back as good as he got. And it was clear from the sound of the
whining servos and his pile driver punches, that his goddamn cuddly-looking suit was a
kind of armored, hydraulically enhanced exoskeleton.
We traded punches for a while like Mike Fink and Pecos Bill. Working each other
over in a cloud of coruscating snow.
I attempted some karate, but it wasn’t any use on his armored frame. It was like
sparring with construction machinery. His exoskeleton combat suit was a monster. He
came at me like a pile driver, like my namesake, a triphammer.
And, despite my armor, his blows hurt. Like being hit with a car.
I was smashing up his frame, denting his stupid snowman suit, but he didn’t seem
to feel any pain.
“I could keep this up all day, Bug-Man,” he said. “I live for this sort of thing!”
“Fuck you, Frosty!” I cleverly retorted.
The thick, powdered snow on the road that we were waltzing around in was
sitting on a layer of ice, and we both slipped and fell occasionally, lending a silent movie
comedy element to our epic battle. (As the late, sainted Rodney Dangerfield pointed out,
A WINTER’S TALE
15
you don’t get any respect in this life.)
Then, suddenly, the Snowman backed away from me, unraveling his long,
colorful scarf from his neck. He whipped back with it, swung it like a bola, and cracked
it at me like a bullwhip.
I wasn’t expecting that one.
It seemed to be weighted, and it cut through the air and wrapped around my head
like a python. It seemed to be magnetized or something.
“Yeah, it’s magnetized, Sport,” the Snowman said, guessing my thoughts. “You
got enough metal in that dumb bug mask of yours.”
I was blind as Stevie Wonder. And the Snowman wailed into me like a pile driver.
I fell to the road, thrashed around in the wretched, thick, sepia-colored slush, felt
like an idiot. Frosty started kicking me while I was down, with his shiny black buckleboots, which were apparently reinforced with steel.
I gasped. Sucked air. Felt like my ribs were fracturing.
And I was angry: a red haze in the cloud of sparkling white powder. I fired an
electrical bolt from my middle finger ring terminal in the Snowman’s general direction.
It hit him like a miniature bolt of lightning, giving him a nasty jolt of electricity in
his exoskeleton. I was gratified to hear him yelp.
I rolled in the snow and tore off the scarf…to see the roly-poly Snowman
stumbling backward, blown off his feet like Oliver Hardy, to land in a snowdrift.
He rose quickly.
But I fired a rocket from my forearm launcher. It streaked through the snowy air
in a blur, smacked into him and exploded, blowing him back once again. That took him
by surprise. He stayed down.
Rising fast, I blasted off with my jetpack, sailed through the icy air, and landed
with both heavy metal-armored feet crashing into his kisser, wedging the bastard in a
goddamned snow bank.
I leaped off and spun in the air, shooting a quick glance in Cricket’s direction to
see if she was still OK.
She wasn’t.
Cricket is a world-class gymnast and a black belt at two or three obscure martial
arts disciplines, but she was fighting a horde of nasty little people on powdered, snowcovered ice, and was slipping and sliding…
A nasty little elf whacked her with a tire iron. She gasped. Her outfit was
armored, too, but that must have done some damage.
I was livid.
I blasted up in the air, a cloud of snow flying, and leapt over to her, landing and
scattering vicious little elves in all directions.
Unfortunately, downstage, the Snowman was recovering.
He rose, surveyed the scene, and pulled one of his coal black buttons off his
snowy exoskeleton…
A WINTER’S TALE
16
Then wound up like Sandy Kofax and pitched it at Cricket and me, somewhere in
the mob of elves.
“Incoming Bug Death, Little People!!” he yelled.
The elves had apparently been training for this. They scattered like a flock of
multi-colored birds.
But Cricket and I had been around the over-hero block a few times, as well.
“Let’s fly, Boss!!” she yelled.
And we both shot up in the air as the happy black button landed in what had
recently been our neighborhood. It landed on a powdered sugar confection car. KABOOM! The car exploded, taking the neighboring powdered sugar bushes and trees with
it. The air was filled with a cloud of crystal snow, steel shrapnel and flaming kindling.
Shrapnel slammed into me, but I was protected by my white insectoid armor.
Rocketing through the snow-filled air, I glanced at Cricket and was relieved that my love
was OK.
The Snowman continued ripping the coal buttons off his armored suit and hurling
them through the air at us.
I landed in someone’s Currier & Ives print yard next to one of those beautiful
ornate Upstate New York front porches, and blasted off again. An instant later, the
wooden porch and a row of charming little snow-laden pines were pulped to flaming
kindling.
I decided to try another headlong attack, and flew directly down the road, a
corridor of trees rushing past, green-and-brown-and-white, the Snowman zooming up
into my POV, still pitching his coal black buttons.
But a sudden blast went off in the gray branches to my immediate right, fire and
wood shrapnel flying…
And – tumbling in mid-air – I was horrified to see…the Snowman making another
pitch…and another blast going off near Cricket – my Zoë – knocking her out of the air!
And I tumbled…went down in a sudden tailspin and crashed to the snow-covered
road below.
I rolled in a cloud of snow. Smacked my elbow, neck, and knee. It hurt. (I had a
sudden urge to vomit. And restrained myself, remembering that I was wearing a full-face
mask.)
My jetpack was dented, damaged. Burning wildly in the snow. Burning my
back. I hit a button on the harness. Jettisoned it.
I was in shock, stunned. My head was on the road, immersed in thick, cold, rock
salt slush.
Where is Cricket? I thought. Is she all right?
I had a weird, momentary glance from my worm’s eye view of the road: all the
hundreds of thousands of geometric patterns molded into the sepia slush by ten thousand
tire tracks -- a billion Jell-O mold geometric formations of sepia slush, a snaking
mountain range of weird, gray geometric patterns to infinity.
I thought, again, Cricket. Is Cricket, OK?!
A WINTER’S TALE
17
And, as I rose, (knee, arm, back, neck, in pain) I saw:
The Snowman. Coming at me. Driving a snowplow.
A Snowplow? Where in God’s name did he get a snowplow?
One of those weird ones that look like some kind of funky toy-machine in a Terry
Gilliam movie. Like a Steam Age dragster. Dark yellow, orange-buff color, a big
squared-off cube thing on the back with a Dr. Seuss smokestack, an inverted pyramid
glass control booth on top. With the Snowman in it, driving, laughing, plowing a wave of
cold snow at me like a tsunami breaking on the beach of the Big Island…
And…
It hit me…
I was plowed up, rising in a wave of snow – it was like a car accident – too fast to
register in the brain. Without thinking, I attempted to dive off stage – too late – the steel
of the plow hit my side, my burned back, clipped my head…
And I was plowed to the side of the road…into a ditch, a long culvert with a little
frozen stream by the woods…fed by a cute little frozen waterfall…hurled in a wave of
cold and white and sepia…
My head shattered crystal icicles hanging from gray-black siltstone, smashed into
the ice of a little frozen stream. I raised my head (painfully), was vaguely aware of bright
red berries on a swirling sepia Jackson Pollock thorn bush in my face, and then,
somewhere in the distance, I caught a glimpse of my white winter Hoppercar exploding…
Somewhere in the distance sirens were wailing…
And then everything went from white to black…
*
*
*
The Snowman and his Elf Gang, having defeated their insectoid adversaries, take off.
A particularly nasty elf suggests shooting the Grasshopper in the head.
But the Snowman nixes the idea. “No sense overdoing it, Gary,” he says.
“They’re out of our hair. Let’s make tracks.”
The Snowman and the Elves finish loading their ill-gotten gains on the snow
trackers, leap aboard the great white machines, and drive off into the falling, blowing
snow…into the distance…through the charming suburban streets of the frozen little
town…
The police finally arrive.
A WINTER’S TALE
18
(They are a bit slow on the justice front, as they have been preoccupied arresting
anti-war protesters at an Army/Marine recruiting station at a shopping mall on the edge of
town. We must keep our priorities straight.)
They give pursuit.
Once again, the snow machines drive off into the country.
And the police pursue the snow trackers through the swirling storm of snow. On
ice covered roads, past ornate old Upstate New York houses, great red barns and white
phallic silos, feathery sepia trees undulating like undersea creatures, and great dark green
pines, laden with snow like hackneyed Christmas decorations…
And, once again, the Snowman and his convoy drive off into the snow-covered
fields, leaving the cops behind. The pathetic police exit their cars and watch them go.
This time three police helicopters converge on the scene. But, aware of the last
helicopter debacle, they warily keep their distance. They can make out the Snowman’s
convoy racing through the fields and forests below and they attempt to follow from a
distance, keeping the convoy surrounded.
It doesn’t work.
The Snowman is at the controls of his big anti-aircraft gun-sized freeze ray. He
locks in on a chopper and lets fly with a shimmering electric-blue blast…
The weapon has a much longer range than the hapless police would have guessed.
Even at the range of a kilometer or two, the ray easily finds its way to a copter.
A cold, bright, blue-white glare fills the glass of the copter’s bubble, blinding the
pilots. They are suddenly very cold. Arctic cold. Beyond artic cold. The cold cuts thru
their parkas like a scalpel. Thick crystal ice forms on the bubble. Ice coalesces on the
big rotating blades, and the chopper descends to the fields below.
The cops in the remaining two choppers take the hint, and the copters bank and
withdraw from the area.
Sitting at the controls of his anti-aircraft freeze ray, the Snowman indulges in a
hearty, villainous laugh. He taunts the authorities on police radio frequencies: “That’s it
little copper-choppers: fly, fly away! Live to write tickets and apprehend jaywalkers
another day!”
The elf called Gary calls up to him from a control panel on the side of the snow
tracker, “Still got ‘em on radar, Boss. They’re just followin’ at a longer distance.”
“Umm…persistent bastards,” mutters the Snowman. “OK, OK. Let’s try…this.”
He hits a touch pad on his control organ. A big, cartoonish, pointy, radar dish
looking thing aims at the distant choppers.
And, three kilometers away, in the cockpit bubble of the cop-choppers, the police
radio band crackles and begins to play… “The Little Drummer Boy”.
One of the cops says, “What the fuck…?”
The other says, “What is this shit?”
The maudlin, inane, near-psychotic song continues on its wretched way. Cop One
says, “Jeez… I’ve always hated that song.”
A WINTER’S TALE
19
And, when the song reaches its chorus, that idiotic “Rump-puh-puh-puhmmm”
part, all the electronics suddenly give out in the copter, both copters actually, and they
plunge to the forest below…
On his snow tracker, snow and wind whipping, the Snowman watches the distant
crashes in the forest through a pair of high-tech uber-binoculars, and says to Gary, the
evil elf, who has joined him on the runner of the anti-aircraft freeze ray, “Fuck. Whoa.
Y’know Gare, I had no idea if that was going to work. That’s a new one. Remind me to
make a fortune selling the technology to evil terrorists.”
Gary guffaws heartily at his boss’s cruel joke, his voice like a braying donkey.
The Snowman joins in, chuckling merrily.
When, suddenly, he hears…a distant humming…an insect buzzing… He turns to
the sound. The elf gang members, clinging to the roofs and running board rails of the
snow trackers, chatter and point to the distant hills…
The snowfall is dying down, and the moon is out now, a glowing globe of misty
light like a golden ballroom chandelier. And in the moonlight they see…
An armored hovercraft…coming up fast out of the hills, headed in their direction.
It’s toroid-shaped and white – with a big stylized art deco locust head on the bow.
And it’s coming fast like a hydrofoil, kicking up a big white cloud of powdery snow…
*
*
*
Yes, Dear Reader. That was us.
Never say die.
I had come-to in the ditch with the little frozen waterfall, with Cricket hovering over me
like a winter-themed insectoid angel.
When the Snowman was blowing up the neighborhood with his coal buttons, she
had withdrawn to the snow-covered gables of a nearby house. And after the Snowman
and his wretched elves took off in their snow trackers, she flew to me.
And I regained consciousness – even though I felt like something the cat dragged
in. And, even though our beautiful white winter Hoppercar was now a jumble of halfmelted scrap metal blasted all over the charming little neighborhood, I had had the sense
to provide a back-up vehicle: the Hover-Locust had been following us at a discreet
distance, piloted by a computer-drone.
A WINTER’S TALE
20
And once aboard, it was an easy matter to tune to the police radio band and follow
the Snowman’s trail…
We came up fast on the convoy. Adrenalin rushing. Leaving a plume of snow in our
wake.
I hit a touch pad on the dash. And the lasers shot out of the eyes of the big art
deco locust head on the front of the white armored hovercraft. The thin red beams shot
through the winter night, across the snow-covered fields, and cut the treads on one of the
Snowman’s trackers. It wobbled crazily in the snow, then rolled over and crashed with
clouds of powdered snow and colorful flying elves like a scene out of a holiday-themed
Road Warrior.
I hit a touch pad for windscreen magnification, and it zeroed in on the Snowman’s
tracker. I saw him clamoring back onto the control seat of his anti-aircraft cold ray.
He began firing it in our direction, but I took evasive action and brought the
hovercraft in fast. We shot over the moonlit fields, dodging from side-to-side, avoiding
the ray. It felt like a video game. The cold blue ray hit pine trees and cedars and maples,
encasing them in sparkling towers of ice like insects trapped in amber.
In the hovercraft cockpit, I said to Girl Wonder, “We’re on the defensive, here.
Let’s take the battle to them.”
“Wicked cool!” she cried. “Let’s rock-and-roll!!”
We hit matching touch pads. And the Hover-Locust rose up in the air on a cloudcushion of snow. Our sections of the control deck broke away, morphing and reforming,
and two white anodized steel attachments telescoped us out from the port and starboard
of the craft like the wings of a hydrofoil…
And then the attachments released us…and we dropped to the field, riding two
white armored high-tech locust-themed snowmobiles…
The Hopper-Hovercraft dropped back, now piloted once again by computer drone,
and Cricket and I roared forward on our armored snowmobiles to the attack, kicking up
great plumes of white, powdery snow…
The elves on the roaring snow-trackers opened fire at us with side arms and rifles.
But the new force field device Walter had rigged on the snowmobiles nicely stopped the
bullets. Our snowmobiles glowed with an electric blue crystal bubble of force that
vaporized the bullets to fairy dust.
We returned fire with the snowmobile’s machine guns – loaded up with rubber
bullets – and started blowing motley-colored elves off the speeding snow trackers.
It was sort of fun.
I felt a twinge of guilt over the brutal side of my nature.
A WINTER’S TALE
21
Cricket drove her snowmobile up alongside the Snowman’s convoy, leapt onto a
snow tracker, and waded into the Snowman’s Elf Gang, battling them with an acrobatic
martial arts grace, like that super-martial arts girl in Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon.
(And, again, somehow it didn’t seem so bad, kicking the hell out of a pack of criminal
midgets – because she’s a teenage girl and pretty petite, herself.)
But there were a lot of elves (Where in hell did the Snowman recruit them from?)
and Cricket couldn’t be everywhere at once. As she was kicking the bejezus out of two
or three elves, a fourth one climbed up along the tracker behind her…and gassed her with
a glowing candy cane gun.
And she went down…
…almost tumbling off the side of the speeding snow tracker into the clouds of
moon-lit snow… But she was grabbed by a score of tiny hands, and hauled back,
struggling with a clutch of vile, lecherous little elves…
My stomach went cold. Freaked-out, frightened, I zoomed in fast on the snow
tracker, trying to pick off the elves on the rig with rubber bullets. But I couldn’t risk
hitting Cricket, so I could only nail the surrounding elves.
I caught sight of an elf out of my peripheral vision on yet another speeding
tracker, trying to get a bead on me with a rocket propelled grenade launcher. The thing
was damn near big as he was.
I hit a touch pad on the snowmobile’s dash – setting it to explode – and blasted off
with my jetpack rig. I flew up into the gelid air, the cold cutting through me like a knife
despite my white armored suit…
The snowmobile kept going. And rammed into the flanks of a snow tracker –
exploding, blowing off the back end of the vehicle, scattering elves – a sudden flash of
red-and-yellow-and-blue screaming in a world of white – shrapnel flying, sending up
great clouds of powdery, sparkling snow and leaving the tracker flaming and smoking in
my wake, rolling and tumbling in wild clouds of moonlit snow…
I zoomed in fast – flying up alongside a tracker – firing rubber bullets from coaxial machine guns mounted on the jet rig – knocking elves ass-over-teakettle off the
speeding rig…
Elves fired back at me from the neighboring trackers – racing through the moonlit
fields – smashing through wooden fence posts and barbed wire half-buried in snow –
shattered wood flying and black wire whipping in clouds of iridescent, moonlit snow –
me pitching and dodging their bullets. It was like a demented arcade game.
But I wasn’t paying attention to the Big Guy – the Snowman, himself…
And, to my horror, he nailed me. With a big, hand-held, cold ray gun. Shooting
me out of the air.
The world flashed. Went a gelid, electric blue.
I went cold.
Very cold.
A WINTER’S TALE
22
And frost…ice…formed around me – almost instantly – I was engulfed in a…
giant ice ball… My jets flamed out…and I crashed to the frozen white earth like a
Warner Bros. cartoon character…rolling in an avalanche of sparkling snow…down a hill
in a cartoon avalanche…to crash into a thicket of gray-brown-black, very solid trees.
A rush of snow, a cloud of crystal white, sepia-gray bark, flat black, ragged
patterns, flash of pain, green pine boughs, a smell of pine, vertigo-nausea, shattered
branches (broken bones?) chunks of ice, cloud of crystal white moonlight…
And then I went to black…
*
*
*
The Snowman, standing on his speeding snow tracker, raises his purple mittens to the
heavens and yells, “Hooo-eeeee!! Just like skeet shooting!! I got me a country
soooooouuper-hee-ro!!”
The elves laugh evilly.
By now, the little bastards have Cricket in some kind of metallic, high tech
restraints, her hands cuffed behind her back, her ankles in leg irons…
She’s a bit dazed, in shock.
And the Snowman directs his snow tracker over to the tracker she’s riding upon,
hangs off the side with one hand, and leaps nimbly aboard to snap a steel collar and chain
on her…
He pulls off her full-face mask, takes her chin in one mittened hand, looks at her
adorable (heart-shaped) face, her short chestnut hair blowing in the wind, and says,
“Whoa!! Looks like we got a little door prize on this caper!”
Then he playfully squeezes one of the globes of her perfect derriere…
The lecherous little elves laugh merrily.
Cricket wants to kill him.
The Snowman’s convoy slows and makes a U-turn and circles the snow-covered fields,
picking up the wounded, scattered elves.
“It would be bad for moral to leave ‘em behind,” the Snowman whispers in an
aside to the captive Cricket. “Besides, one of the ungrateful little weasels might sing…”
A WINTER’S TALE
23
And then the Snowman’s convoy drives off into the sparkling blue-black winter
night, the evil elves, all red-and-green-and-yellow motley, laughing like cheap drunks
down at the neighborhood sports bar, and Cricket, angry and frightened, trapped in her
high tech silver bonds…
Leaving Everyone’s Favorite Rural Over-Hero, the Intrepid Grasshopper, to
freeze to death in the sparkling, iridescent, moonlit snow…
A WINTER’S TALE
24
ACT II
Exterior. Night. Snow-covered fields.
The moon is crazy. It’s full, surrounded by a big opalescent, multi-colored ring.
The hills are silver. The trees spectral and black.
The Snowman’s convoy is a high tech ghost train, trailing luminous clouds of
revenant white.
Closer. We see Cricket in silver-white bondage. Moonlight. Snow falling and
blowing. The Snowman riding his snow tracker like a mad frozen wind surfer. The Evil
Elves are yucking it up.
*
*
*
I came to in a snowy ravine. Moonlight. A smell of pine.
It was cold. I hurt. I wanted to vomit.
I peeled off my white bug mask and threw up.
Better.
I was lying in an avalanche deposit of snow and big chunks of ice and mangled
steel from my jetpack/machine gun rig. The steel was glowing silver-white from the
moonlight and burned cold to the touch.
The internal heating system in my white winter Grasshopper suit had failed. I
was in imminent danger of freezing to death. My fingers and toes stung. I hoped I
wasn’t going to lose them.
“You OK, Boss?” a voice said from somewhere above me.
I looked up.
Floating above me, in the moonlight, was another, smaller moon. A hovering,
glowing, silver sphere. About the size of a basketball, with little white rubber hose robot
arms and two big 1930’s Mickey Mouse three-fingered hands. It carried a white med bag
with a fat Red Cross logo strapped over its little shoulder and held a spent syringe in its
fat little fingers.
“Jeez-Louise,” it said. “I had to use the smelling salts and give you a big hit of
tweak to get you up and running.”
A WINTER’S TALE
25
“Choam!” I said (somewhat stupidly) as the thing hovered down, examining me.
Choam was our faithful, Organo-AI Med Robot Utility Drone. Walter and Kenny,
my armor-and-design team, had designed it, of course. But the little Mickey Mouse
hands and somewhat insouciant vocal patterns were Cricket’s touch. And she christened
the little AI “Choam Nomsky”, a name only a very bright teenage girl would think up.
“Are you sure this is the right line of work for you GH?” Choam said. “Maybe
it’s not too late to back to college!”
“Look, Choam,” I said, “Can the jokes and call in the Hover-Drone, huh?”
“Hey – you’re wish is my command!”
*
*
*
Later.
Northern Lights Industries. Under a cold full moon. The sky is a deep blueblack, the clouds and the complex iridescent silver. We’re viewing it from a hill, snowladen pines in the foreground. The trees are deep green-black; the snow is glowing with
reflected moonlight.
We see a distant convoy of snow trackers descending on the complex, a silverwhite ghost caravan…
*
*
*
Choam finished dragging me out of the snow and debris.
The big white torus-shaped hovercraft hovered alongside us in the moonlight at
the bottom of the ravine by the dark green-black forest. I hit a touch pad on my
applicability belt, a silver-white door opened like the hatch on a Delorian, and I climbed
aboard.
Everything hurt.
I was suffering pain from multiple contusions or worse. I settled into a form-fit
digital chair. Choam joined me on the bridge.
I experienced another wave of nausea. Struggled not to throw up in the cockpit.
Wondered if I was coming down with a cold or flu as well.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
That was internal.
A WINTER’S TALE
26
Cricket had been captured. The big wild love of my pathetic life had just been
abducted by a sociopath in an armored snowman suit and troop of vicious little midgets.
I was afraid.
I felt stupid.
I felt like an idiot, and a child molester, and a garishly costumed sociopath,
myself, for allowing my all-too-young, barely-out-of childhood girlfriend act out my
adolescent male power fantasies.
I had no idea how I’d get her back. Safely. Make this insanity better.
I thought, somewhat ruefully, This is why they have law enforcement
professionals (as lame as they are). Why vigilantes wearing Halloween costumes are
against the law.
(The writer Anne Lamott likened her mind to an undisciplined puppy. That
certainly describes my mind – even when it’s functioning in top form. And this frozen,
hellish night, mine was a morass of doubts, fears, pain, disbelief, and a near complete
lack of hope, faith, or confidence in my own meager abilities. I wanted to curl up in a
fetal position and die.)
“You look like something the cat dragged in,” said Choam.
I considered shooting him, but he had more than likely saved my life, so I settled
for waving him away like a giant fly.
I went to work. Hit a touch pad. And turned on the satellite Global Positioning
System locked in a Cricket’s locator chip.
*
*
*
Interior.
Somewhere in the Snowman’s lair. Somewhere in the Ice Industries complex.
A large darkened laboratory. Filled with all kinds of arcane equipment. It looks
like Jack Kirby designed it for an old 1960’s Fantastic Four comic. Big, hulking, gray
machinery. Fantastic shapes. Like big…toys.
We find Cricket, her white, armored snow outfit removed, wearing a somewhat
more revealing under-outfit (high tech, insectoid, little cupcake bra cups, thong
underwear) stretched out, spread-eagle, and chained to an enormous drafting table.
She’s lit with nice ambient monster movie lighting. Somewhere Danny Elfman
music is playing. The Snowman approaches in the dark, hands clasped behind his back,
accompanied by an elfin aide-de-camp.
“We got her chained up like you told us, Boss,” the elf says.
“Great. Great. Good going, Gary,” the Snowman says. “And you can call me
Jeffrey, Little Buddy. I’m an egalitarian kind of guy.”
A WINTER’S TALE
27
He pauses before Cricket.
“And I don’t think Insect Girl, here is going anywhere anytime soon to spill the
beans about the boss’s secret identity.”
That’s for sure, Boss! Uh…I mean Jeffrey.”
The Snowman leans in to examine the beautiful young girl.
“Whoo! That’s some addition to the trophy room, huh? Nice underwear. Are
those Calvin Klein?”
The elf laughs a nasty little lecherous laugh.
“OK, you can split, Gary,” the Snowman says. “I’ll interview the prisoner.”
The nasty little midget looks disappointed and takes off, disappearing in the
gloom.”
“And thanks for laughing at the boss’s jokes, Gare!” the Snowman calls after him.
“You guys can all expect a bag of oranges this Christmas!”
A distant steel door opens/closes.
The Snowman leans in cheerfully over Cricket, who recoils a bit from his leering
presence.
“They’re great little guys,” he confides. “Actually, I’m gonna give ’em all a
basket of sausages and cheeses and stuff.”
He examines Cricket carefully.
“Mmm. You really are a cupcake.”
“You are the Prince of Icky, Dude,” she says.
“Yeah, I suppose I am,” he says. “Like the Danny Elfman, music?”
He hits a secret touch pad on his armored headpiece and removes his stupid
Snowman helmet. With his mask off, he is revealed to be a handsome, middle-aged man
of about thirty-five. And he’s got black makeup circling his eyes, giving him a decadent,
theatrical look.
Cricket thinks, Wow, he’s an old guy, in his thirties…
She says, “Nice mascara, Sport. Makes you look like a raccoon.”
The Snowman laughs.
“My Christian name is Jeffrey Ice. Appropriate, huh?”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m a self-made multi-millionaire -- engineer, industrialist, real estate baron,” he
says, getting in some controlled boasting.
“And you’re sort of age-challenged.”
“Yes, I suppose that I am,” says Ice. “I’m thirty-five. I’ll be thirty-six in January.
Old enough to get put with the seniors on the ocean cruise. Maybe this whole Snowman
thing has something of the character of a mid-life crisis.”
“You know, I’ve seen you with your mask off, now,” Cricket says.
“It matters not, youngster. You’re in my care now,” says Ice. “You’re my young
ward instead of Bug Guy’s. “I’m planning on keeping you as an objet d’art.”
“Dream on, Sport,” Cricket says.
A WINTER’S TALE
28
Ice leans over, examining Cricket’s healthy young body. Reaches out a finger and
touches her perfect tummy.
“Ummm…you think your insectoid provider will rescue you, like in the comic
books?” says Ice. “He’s a maroon. Despite his loopy costume and absurd weaponry, he’s
just one more faithful defender of the laissez faire capitalist status quo – as much as the
cops or the army.”
“At least he’s not ethically-challenged like some old guys we know,” Cricket says.
“Mmm. Yes, the criminal demimonde. Our unhappy country is run by
criminals,” says Ice. “The president and his family come to mind.”
“You’ve got no argument from me, there,” says Cricket.
“And here in the home of the brave and the land of the free, the banks and
mortgage companies and S&L’s and credit card companies are free to rob people quite
legally. Hell, the banking laws of the United States were written by the banking industry
– around 1910 at J.P. Morgan’s hunting club on Jeckle Island off the Coast of Georgia
when they cooked up the Fed – which by the way is privately owned for private profit.”
“You’re losing me, here.”
“The point is… your master and mentor, Bug Guy, for all his money and gadgetry
and general weirdness, is just an absurdly-costumed defender of the Winners, the
Republican oligarchy, your corporate masters, the status quo…”
“And you are…?”
“I see myself as a colorful, romantic Robin Hood sort of figure.”
“Except you keep the money.”
“Well sure. I’m not denying it. But I’m thinking about starting a foundation,
getting into philanthropy in a big way…”
“I’ll bet you’ve got a nice bridge in Brooklyn you want to sell me, too.”
“Now, that’s not a very nice crack. Look, the president’s family makes millions,
billions from their arms companies and the wars they prosecute, and every white trash,
red state yahoo in a cowboy hat loves the evil bastards. And the police are busy busting
impoverished old people for shoplifting their meds down at the supermarket. The whole
system’s rigged.”
“Excuse me,” Cricket says, “But we have established here that you are keeping
the money you steal, right? You’re not donating it to charity like Paul Newman or
something. It’s not exactly like you’re a communist or anything.”
“Well, you’ve got me there,” says Ice. “I’m not sure little ol’ me can right all the
wrongs in the world…so, yes, I do keep the money.”
Ice gently lifts an errant strand of hair from Cricket’s forehead, strokes her head
like a pet cat. “I’m keeping you, too.”
Ice assumes that Cricket will never be free of him. He plans to keep her as a sex
toy, an object of conquest, a trophy. Cricket is a heartbreakingly beautiful nineteen-yearold girl.
“Sort of like a bowling trophy,” he says.
A WINTER’S TALE
29
As Jeffrey Ice strokes Cricket’s chestnut hair, he leans in to kiss her on the
cheek…and notices a small, glittering, tasteful piercing in her temple (that her over-hero
mentor and lover much-disapproved of)…
“Mmm…you young people and your Zulu piercings. You all look like you fell
into a tackle box.”
“That’s a Garrison Keillor joke.”
“Hey, what can I say? I’m a thief.”
He examines it closer.
“Interesting design, Kiddo. Love the cricket head motif…”
Ice picks up a Star Trek-issue device about the size of a cell phone and waves it
over the piercing. The device beeps softly, and then goes into a steady whine.
Ice says, “Oooh! A little Cricket-tracer!! Cool! Just like Spider-Man!!”
He ponders. Gestures theatrically. Says, “Now I can set a trap for your insectoid
master…using you, little succulent sidekick…as live bait!”
*
*
*
Meanwhile, the insectoid master was in his winter hovercraft, its Global Positioning
System honed in on Cricket’s tracer, zeroing in on that great dickhead in a snowman suit,
his nasty little elves, his wretched Ice Industries…
I was feeling less like a loser, less like an idiot, less frightened…by doing
something.
But my mouth went dry with fear, my stomach cold, whenever I thought of
Cricket.
My missing love. My kidnapped love.
And panic would flood in again at the edges of my consciousness like water
seeping into a basement.
The bridge of the hovercraft seemed cold and empty without her. And Choam,
floating around the cabin like a giant insect, speaking with Cricket’s insouciant
inflections, seemed like some freaky punishment in a Kafkaesque Hell.
And I seemed to be coming down with some sort of cold or flu. My limbs felt
achy and strange. My mind seemed to be drifting.
Some nasty, dark side of the moon part of me wanted to kill the Snowman. Rip
his heart out and stomp on it. Not exactly Christian charity, or behavior approved by the
Dalai Lama or anything, but there it was.
The snow thundered up in big clouds beneath the jets of the hovercraft.
Silver hills and black spectral forest shot forward in forced perspective in the
digitally enhanced view screen like the graphics of a computer game.
A WINTER’S TALE
30
I kept to the back roads (silver winding taffy), and the countryside (sweeping
white carpeted hills, black feathery trees, charming bucolic farms), avoiding the major
highways of New York as I traveled north…
*
*
*
This is some serious weirdness, Cricket thinks.
The night sky is a deep indigo blue. The stars blaze with cold fire.
She’s flying with the Snowman and his Elves.
They’re flying north.
In a variety of weird airships: One like a flying igloo, another like a giant red
winter cardinal, one a brightly wrapped Christmas package, another a flying candy cane.
She thinks of Lyra, the protagonist of The Golden Compass. She read Philip
Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy when she was thirteen. She had always thought
that the story became increasingly less realistic and more fantastic, like a fairy tale, the
further north that Lyra traveled. It’s like that, she thinks. Soon, I will be talking to
armored polar bears.
She’s traveling with Jeffrey Ice, still in his ridiculous snowman costume – though
with the helmet off, so he’s got some peripheral vision – in…Santa’s sleigh. This big,
red, ornate airship-sleigh with a cockpit bridge like a 747 and a great Ed “Big Daddy”
Roth bubble top, and a small contingent of the nasty little elves. There’s even a jumble of
shiny, colorful Christmas packages in the back. God knows what’s in them. Whiskey
and cocaine for the elves, perhaps.
She’s bound. Strapped to the co-pilots seat with what appear to be giant colorful
Christmas ribbons.
The Snowman is piloting, the perverted little elves occasionally pinching her like
vitelloni and laughing.
She watches Ice, in the seat next to her, happily piloting the freaky craft…
humming a Christmas tune to himself…clearly having the time of his life…clearly
insane.
He looks at her and says, “Sure you don’t want to switch sides, Kiddo? You can
become my sidekick. We’ll get you a new persona…you know, Ice Girl or Snow Cone or Frostbite
or something.”
“No thanks.”
Cricket ponders. Then says, “Look, uh, Mr. Ice…”
“Call me Jeffrey.”
“OK, Jeffrey. Question: Why?”
“Why?”
A WINTER’S TALE
31
“Why do you do this? You’re already rich, Jeffrey. I mean, like, what’s the
point? Why do you dress up like a…frickin’ cartoon snowman and run around with a
bunch of criminal midgets dressed like frickin’ elves? I mean, like, what’s the point?!”
Ice looks at Cricket with new respect.
“Jeez. You’re sharp, kid.”
“Uh, huh. Well…?”
“Look. It’s like this. I’m bored.”
“Bored.”
“Yes, bored. I’m fucking bored to my teeth. I’m up to my ass in boredom. I’m
the fucking chairman of the bored. American culture is boring. Being fucking rich is
boring.”
“Do tell.”
“Look, wiseass teenage girl, everyone in this wretched benighted plastic culture is
desperate to be rich – and who can blame them? It’s like Kurt Vonnegut wrote: it’s not a
crime to be poor in America, but it might as well be. But let me tell ya, being rich is no
goddamn happiness panacea.
“Look, until I got this over-villain thing happening, I spent most of my time doing
paperwork. You try being an industrialist and real estate baron. Boring, boring, boring. I
spent most of my waking hours in meetings-from-Hell and talking on the phone to people
that I despised – and most of my days were spent in the company of seriously angry
people.
“And money. If you have a lot of money, you quickly run out of things to buy.
It’s like, yeah, I really need another badly-engineered, over-priced, piece-of-shit SUV
with giant exploding tires, or I guess I’ll buy another house in Aspen when I’ve already
got a dozen of the goddamn things, or maybe I can get a nice forty thousand dollar lamp
at Tiffany’s or something…
“I mean it’s stupid… I mean, I’m gonna die… We’re all gonna die…”
‘Uh-huh,” says Cricket, wondering just how crazy this guy is.
“And, yeah, I was born to money, like Howard Hughes or Donald Trump, those
lame Wonder Boys, and I did OK; I didn’t squander it on dope or the track, but it was…
hollow. I mean, it’s no wonder that Howard Hughes made bad movies and built giant
crazy airplanes and surrounded himself with Mormons and wore Kleenex boxes on his
feet…and – Jesus – I’m talking a lot, huh?”
“Um, I didn’t want to say anything…”
“Well, let’s just say…this…[here, Jeffrey gestures to his absurd Snowman
costume, the sleigh-ship, the flying cardinal, the igloo, the candy cane]…is fun. Big Time
fun. I’m having a good time, here. It’s not exactly like my life has…meaning…but I’m
enjoying the passage of time.”
Cricket thinks: I, on the other hand, am not having a good time. This sucks.
Jeffrey says, “And think over that evil sidekick offer, huh?”
“Sure,” says Cricket. Then, “Look, it’s a nice offer, Jeffrey, but I’m really kind of
committed to the Big Green Guy.”
A WINTER’S TALE
32
“I’ll settle Bug Guy’s hash.”
“Um.”
There is silence for a while.
Then Cricket says, “These are really impressive vehicles, though.”
“Hey, thanks. Designed ‘em myself!”
*
*
*
I felt awful. Just awful.
I wondered again if I was coming down sick.
It was about 3:00 A.M. in the morning. I had found my way to Ice Industries. It
was in an industrial park on the outskirts of Nevermore, New York, a suburb north of
Carthage.
It was deserted.
It took a while to scope out the plant from a distance. It took time to break in and
creep the place, and search all the buildings.
It was deserted. Hollow. Echoing. Haunted. The Snowman hadn’t even left any
elfin security guards.
I felt like an idiot. I was seriously frightened. Sick with despair over losing
Cricket. My young friend. My beloved.
I questioned my whole life.
As near as I could make out, they’d taken to the air…traveling north.
And the bastard had apparently located and turned off Cricket’s tracer…
I had no idea where they were.
*
*
*
It has a big frozen waterfall.
Not a real one. It’s made of some sort of hyper-plastic. Still, it’s pretty
impressive. The goddamn thing is stories high. The size of a skyscraper. With these big
giant hanging icicles and the surrounding siltstone and shale covered with a Roger Dean
fantasia of artificial ice sculpture.
A WINTER’S TALE
33
It’s cold enough for it to be real here in the Adirondacks. Somewhere far below
zero. But this place does its real business in the summer.
At the bottom of the great glittering icefalls is a village of big hemispherical
cartoon igloo buildings, like in an old-fashioned, hand-drawn animated cartoon.
And there’s a cute little building down there that looks like Santa’s workshop, with
reindeer and a striped candy cane pole out front, and a village that appears to made out of
cookies and candies, and another village that looks like a collection of giant lighted gel
presents. Rifle-toting elves, and giant cartoon polar animals, and what appear to be giant
gingerbread people, walking Christmas cookies, patrol the perimeter of the complex,
guarding the whole affair.
“Audio-animatronics,” says Jeffrey. “Cool, huh?” I hired a lot of the designers
away from Disney’s Imagineering.”
Cricket, still tied to the co-pilot seat on the bridge of the absurd Santa’s sleigh
airship vehicle, gazes down out of the Big Daddy Roth glass bubble at the ridiculous
theme park below. Then she looks at Jeffrey, now wearing his crazy Snowman helmet,
and thinks, He’s mentally ill. Really, seriously, mentally ill. If he weren’t so frigging
rich, he’d be, like, committed or undergoing shock therapy or something…
She says, “This is…the Northern Lights, right?”
“Bingo!” cries Jeffrey. God, you’re a smart little cookie! Wanna see the
lights…?”
“Uh, sure.”
Jeffrey fingers a touch screen on the dash with a fat mittened finger, and,
suddenly, the air is filled with color…great pulsating streamers of green and blue…a
gossamer curtain of light dancing in the indigo winter night…washing the whole creepy,
improbable park with garish, psychedelic color. The artificial Aurora Borealis reflects in
Cricket’s multifaceted insectoid goggles and paints Jeffrey’s white snowman outfit a
lurid, luminous cyan.
“How about those lights, huh?” Jeffrey says. “Better than fireworks. Designed
‘em myself. Hidden tanks in the hillsides release my “special sauce” gas, and those
candy cane towers zap electrically charged ions through it. Wild, huh?”
“It is pretty rad,” Cricket allows.
The Snowman says, “Ice Industries – that’s me, folks – owns the Northern Lights
theme park. It really brings in the bucks. Entertainment – that’s where the big money is.
Though, Sweet Jesus, I wish I could get into casinos…”
Cricket thinks how she always wanted to visit the Northern Lights when she was a
kid. How she grew up poor in a microscopic town in rural Pennsylvania, and one
summer, when she was a kid, her parents took her and her sisters camping in the
Adirondacks, and she begged them to take the family to the Northern Lights, but they
never made it, and she was devastated, just devastated…
She decides to withhold this information from Jeffrey.
He looks down and says, “God, this place rocks!”
A WINTER’S TALE
34
He turns to her, the weird lights glowing blue and green on his freaky Snowman
suit, and says, “And lucky you! You get a lifetime silver pass, Kiddo!”
*
*
*
I took the hovercraft back to the farm.
Cricket’s tracer had come back on again.
It showed her traveling north. In the air. At about 20,000 feet.
I sat in the main Hopper Lab in the Control Barn, before the big Cray XMP
supercomputer. The Global Positioning System pinpointed Cricket in New York’s
Adirondack Mountains.
It was too far to travel by hovercraft. I was going to need special equipment.
The camouflaged, white latex-covered panels opened like a flower petal, throwing up a
cloud of powdered snow, revealing the depths of the Hopper Hanger, hidden in a snowcovered hillside.
I rose into the winter night, blades beating, the nocturnal winter landscape
descending below me.
I rose quickly. Banking up into the indigo sky, and the glowing, moonlit clouds.
The Hopper-Copter is one of the most elegant pieces of hardware designed by my
secret engineering team at Riddell. This was the winter version – an iridescent-white
insectoid attack helicopter – delicate as a dragonfly…a winter dragonfly.
I took it up into the silver cloudbanks…up into the sparkling winter night sky…
through puffy opalescent clouds lit by the full moon.
The overhead rotor blades made a great smooth, roaring, beating sound.
Moonlight reflected like cold fairy dust on the glass bubble turret decorated with
psychedelic frost patterns. There was a clean, inhuman smell like that of a new car: latex
and steel and motor oil.
I put Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft on the CD player and set the onboard computer
to dodge commercial and military flights.
And shot through the sky, a great white avenging winter dragonfly, heading for
the distant mountains of the north….
*
*
*
A WINTER’S TALE
35
Interior. The Northern Lights.
A big, cold, cavernous room. Full of arcane machinery. Cold blue light and black
shadows. A smell like Freon.
The mise en scene:
Cricket is nude (save for white fur thong panties), on all fours, tied up with
glowing white Christmas lights. (And she’s got a big red bow tied around her waist like
she’s a Christmas present).
She’s on a pedestal, a warm beam of light spotlighting her.
Insipid Christmas music plays softly in the background like at a supermarket.
Two or three nasty little elves have just finished binding her. They exit as The
Snowman/Jeffrey, mask off, dark raccoon eyes gleaming, examines their handiwork.
“Sorry about the humiliation-slash-degradation of this, Little Bud,” he says. “It’s
an adolescent male power fantasy kind of thing. I’m planning on keeping you around as
the spoils-of-war, as I mentioned before. You’ll make a nice sex toy. But first, you’ve
got a little job to perform, Insect Girl… It’s Live Bait, Time.”
“I’m going to kill you for this, Jeffrey” Cricket says evenly.
Jeffrey pats her on the derriere.
“Thanks, Kiddo, I knew you’d understand.”
*
*
*
The white winter dragonfly descended into the moonlit mountains, the dark green pines
rising like great black pinions to meet me.
I was in the northern extremity of the great Adirondack Park. Up near the
Canadian border. The Northern Lights theme park was in the Saranac Lake area, near
Lake Placid and Whiteface Mountain and a little town called, appropriately, The North
Pole. (Other amusement parks in the area included Santa’s Workshop and The Land of
Make Believe.)
I landed the dragonfly in an iridescent spray of powdery moonlit snow. Checked
my equipment. Exited the chopper.
The world was silver with radiant moonlight. My white chopper and my white
armored outfit glowed silver-white in the dark forest.
I wanted to get to Cricket as quickly as possible. I wanted to fly into the Northern
Lights with the chopper, machine guns and rockets blazing. But it was a pretty sure bet
that the Snowman would have security devices that could monitor someone visiting with
a helicopter and would have some sort of defenses.
A WINTER’S TALE
36
So I sat on the pontoon runner in the moonlight and laced my feet into a pair of
white touring boots and stood to snap into the toe bindings of a pair of long thin silverwhite cross-country skis. Then I strapped into my jetpack rig, which now had a silver
snow saucer snapped over it like the carapace of a turtle.
And, grabbing a pair of silver ski poles, I pushed off into the dark forest.
I had to forge my own path through the forest, but eventually I found a trail and the going
was easier.
The temperature was about twenty-below. God knows what the wind-chill factor
was. (I thanked God my winter Grasshopper suit had its own internal heating system.)
I skied through the forest. I sailed through the dark forest like a white wraith.
The skis were remarkably silent. This is what I wanted: A silent, ground level assault on
the Snowman’s absurd, theme park fortress.
The world was glazed with thick solid snow. And there was a carpet of fine
powdery snow sitting on top of that.
The snow sparkled.
A billion billion quartz crystal flashes in the night.
A universe of diamonds in the moonlight.
The black spectral trees cast shadows in the moonlight, a tangle of black shadows
everywhere, like a jungle of tall black grass. There were blobs of snow, hundreds of
thousands of them, clinging to the wild Jackson Pollock undergrowth, glowing in the
moonlight like lights in an Italian restaurant. And there were wild white snow patterns in
all the black trees from the fallen snow clinging to the branches like powdered sugar – an
electrical pattern, like lightning – billions of tendrils of white electricity shooting up from
the forest, glowing in the moonlight.
The moon had a big soft ring around it, glowing softly. Stars glowed and
twinkled on the periphery. Venus burned white like an incoming aircraft.
Through the black trees, there was a beautiful view of distant mountains high over
the frozen diamond lakes, spectacularly lit by the full moon.
There was a fragrant smell of pine.
The forest isn’t dead in winter. Just hibernating. The forest was alive with flora:
wild columbine and wintergreen, bluecurls and bearberry and three-toothed cinquefoil,
mountain laurel and lambkill and star-thistle, cocklebur and sticktight and frostweed,
teasel and dwarf juniper and bitter button, butterfly-weed and more, a poet’s world. (And
I’m not an expert on Winter Flora of the Northeast or anything; I looked this stuff up in a
book.)
A WINTER’S TALE
37
I felt fluish. Like I was running a fever.
And I seemed to be coming down with the sniffles. I had to periodically raise my
mask and blow my nose, which definitely detracted from my scary costumed vigilante
persona.
I was glad no one was around.
I skied through the forest for the better part of an hour, using existing trails, and, where
necessary, forging my own, finally emerging out of a grove of pines and cedars on the
side of a mountain, overlooking the back end of the Northern Lights theme park.
The park nestled below me: the ridiculous spherical cartoon igloo buildings, the
artificial frozen waterfall, the audio-animatronic polar animals, the demented gingerbread
people, and candy cane street lamps and giant Christmas stars and ornaments and
snowflakes softly glowing in the night.
It looked so calm, so peaceful (if a bit loopy), like some dreamlike fragment of
Childhood Lost.
I wanted to rocket down there and kill people.
I felt hot and fluish.
I felt another stab of terror regarding Cricket.
Waves of remorse and guilt and fear. (It comes from having had really bad
parents. I blame myself for everything.)
I unsnapped my feet out of the toeholds of the skis, took off the touring boots, and
put on my regular Kevlar clodhoppers. Then disengaged the large silver aluminum
saucer from my jetpack rig. I set it in the sparkling, powdered snow and climbed into it.
I got the idea from childhood sledding in Upstate New York. I wanted to keep as
low to the ground as possible, not make an inviting silhouette, radar blip, or target.
I gave myself a little push, spun a couple of times, and started down the hill
toward the park…
I moved pretty quickly. The snow was as hard and slick as ice. Apparently, it had
warmed recently and frozen over again, putting a slick sheen of ice over the entire world.
And then there was a layer of fine powdered snow sitting on top of that.
So I moved fast on the ice, leaving a cloud trail of powdered snow rising behind
me in the silver moonlight. It would have been fun if I hadn’t been so terrified and
worried about Cricket. I would have been swept up in the sensation of speed, zooming
down the great hill, dodging trees, heading for the Northern Lights…
A WINTER’S TALE
38
At the bottom of the hill, I shot out of a copse of pines and half-rolled, skidding to
a stop, plowing up powdered snow before a tall silvery electrified fence topped with
digital security cameras spinning slowly back and forth, humming and whirring in the
frozen night.
I had jammed the security cameras on the way down, with a little digital jammer
my design team had cooked up for me. The cameras were now feeding static to whoever
was monitoring the video screens at Park Security.
I rose from the snow saucer, and used my jetpack to leap the fence like my insect
namesake.
I continued on, making big leaps through the park, avoiding the patrols of audioanimatronic polar animals and walking gingerbread persons and electric camera-eyed
reindeer. (The reindeer were like those 3D animated white wire reindeer you see on
people’s lawns at Christmas time – the ones with the white Christmas lights and the
bobbing heads – only these suckers were fully articulated and mobile, traveling in little
glowing herds, scanning the park with their creepy camera eyes.)
I jet-hopped through the forest at the back end of the park, heading for the central
complex of giant cartoon igloo-shaped buildings. Cricket’s signal was coming from one
of the largest of the igloo buildings. It was a construct of multiple domes connected by
spidery white tunnels. I suspected that under the big cartoonish white ceramic “snow
blocks”, it was geodesic in structure.
I shot up with my jetpack to land on top of it.
There were vents and tubes and wind turrets to hide behind. I did a quick check
to see that all was quiet and I hadn’t been spotted, and then cut my way in with a laser
through a convex Plexiglas skylight, and climbed inside onto the underlying steel support
struts.
I climbed down through a dreamlike maze of blue anodized steel struts and blueand-black shadows. I was up in the wings of the theatre, the performance about to start.
Then I jumped, my jetpack slowing my descent through great arcane machinery and more
blue-black shadows. The floor, patterned with great blue-and-white snowflakes, rose to
meet me.
I landed. To view the mise en scene:
Cricket. Nude. On all fours. On a pedestal. Tied up in white Christmas lights.
There was a beam of light on her. From this giant electric snowflake hanging
from the ceiling above her.
I thought: It looks like one of those twisted old Alex Schomburg World War II
Captain America covers. The teenage sidekick bound in some titillating manner for the
over-hero to rescue.
I started toward her, my armored boots clanking on the snowflake floor.
Cricket reacted upon seeing me. But she was gagged. And attempting to warn
me. I, on the other hand, wasn’t thinking clearly. (Must have been the flu thing: My
head hurt. I was woozy. I wanted to lie down.)
Again: I wasn’t thinking clearly. That pedestal. That beam of light on her.
A WINTER’S TALE
39
Jesus. Come on. We’ve all seen enough Raiders movies to know what happens
next.
And…as I reached out to free her, I triggered the trap.
I was blasted with a freeze ray. From that goddamned oversized snowflake on the
ceiling. The ray came down slightly slower than the speed of light – a liquid blue light.
The interior of the great igloo shimmered like a cold blue mirage.
The world became liquid sapphire.
I was suddenly very cold.
The world was sapphirine and shimmering and suddenly very solid.
I couldn’t breath.
I was frozen in a giant block of ice.
Somewhere in the vast structure, steel doors clanged open. And the Snowman and his
evil elves came out of hiding and entered the chamber.
Through the ice, I could see the Snowman and his nasty little henchman gather
around me like a flock of multi-colored birds, like patrons looking at a denizen of a zoo.
I saw, as if through a shower curtain, the Snowman pointing a fat, mittened finger at me,
nodding vigorously, and, I assumed, making a joke. The Elf Gang laughed like hyenas. I
couldn’t hear them.
I also couldn’t breath.
(This was much on my mind.)
Further, the Snowman and his loathsome criminal midgets gathered around the
bound Cricket to continue their cruel and heartless jokes. The Snowman put an all-toofamiliar hand on Cricket’s flanks, and everyone continued to watch the giant block of ice
like a large screen TV, waiting for me to die.
It certainly looked like curtains for everyone’s favorite insect-themed over-hero.
*
*
*
Outside the giant iridescent blue-white block of ice with the over-hero dying in it, tears
descend from Cricket’s green convex multifaceted goggles.
The Snowman examines the insectoid over-hero frozen in the ice and quips,
“Cool! He looks like a bug in a block of amber! Maybe we can use him for a
paperweight!”
The Elf gang laughs merrily at his cruel joke.
A WINTER’S TALE
40
Then, suddenly, the wretched, idiotically garbed villains notice a rising, highpitched humming sound.
“Hello?” says the Snowman. “What’s this?”
The sound grows louder.
The nasty little elves mutter, “What the fuck?” and so on. And then they notice
that the big shimmering ice block is vibrating.
“Whoa! That ice block is doing the Shimmy,” says the Snowman.
The vibrating becomes more insistent, more intense, the humming a great,
rasping, singing sound, like the cicada’s summer song…
And then – the ice explodes outward! Knocking the Snowman and his Elf Gang
to the floor! Several of the wretched little weasels are injured. They moan in pain and
confusion.
*
*
*
Cool gadgetry. It’s important.
I had a sonic-ray that exploded the ice. Hypersonic.
I triggered it with neural-jack, implanted in my brain, behind my right ear. I
realize that sounds sort of icky, like something out of one of those 80’s Cyberpunk
stories, but it’s really just a tiny little filament, and I suspected that someday it might
come in handy. “Be prepared” as the Boy Scouts say.
I triggered it by thinking the Right Kind of Thoughts, by slipping into a Tibetan
Buddhist meditation state that I learned at the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist
Studies (the North American seat of the personal monastery of His Holiness the Dalai
Lama), which is located in my town of Forest City, New York. (There is some value in
living in such a loopily progressive city – the city the Utne Reader called the Most
Enlightened Town in America).
And the hypersonic ray itself emanates from a speaker cone hidden in the locust
head logo on my chest (a design I swiped from the great American cartoonist Alex Toth.)
Question: And why wasn’t Cricket injured in the blast?
Answer: The neurofeedback generated from the Vajrayana meditation state also
triggered a deflection field around my teenage sidekick, emanating from the nanocircuitry cleverly hidden in that eyebrow piercing of hers. (I argued mightily against her
getting that dumb piercing, lost, and finally had Walter and Kenny design the deflection
field nano-circuitry for it, to get some use out of the goddamn thing.)
So there.
A WINTER’S TALE
41
Take that Mr. Smartypants Over-villain in a Stupid Snowman Suit. Our
technology is so much better than your technology! N’yahh, n’yahh, n’yahh,
n’yahhhhh!!
Happily, most of the vile little elf gang was incapacitated in the explosion. The elves
were down, or limping their way out the door. But the Snowman was rising – his idiotic
armored suit had protected him from the blast.
“Gary, get the Little People off to the infirmary,” he said. “I’ll take care of Bug
Guy, here…”
And, as I was working my way out of the remains of the miniature iceberg, he
reached up to the hatband of his shiny black top hat and pulled off what appeared to be a
green-and-white sprig of mistletoe.
“Here’s a little missile-toe for you to chew on, Bug Boy,” he drawled in a credible
W.C. Fields imitation. And hurled it my way.
The green mistletoe leaves morphed like a Japanese robot into a little green
balsawood glider. It bore waxy white berries under its wings like bombs. This was
appropriate. They were plastique.
Still, the fucking idiot had to pause for his stupid over-villain pun and Fields
imitation.
It gave me more than enough time to leap over to Cricket, slip once again into a
Vajrayana state, and throw up a deflection field around the two of us. I mean the stupid
bastard practically gave me enough time to jog around the building a few times and read
a paperback novel before the explosion.
WAH-BOOM. A mushroom of fire tore through the dark, machine-filled room,
wrecking the place. Steel girders fell. Shrapnel and glass flew.
We sneered at it from inside our containment field.
The Snowman’s armored exoskeleton suit had protected him. But I had had more
than enough of this asshole in a Halloween costume. As our deflection field decayed, I
unstrapped my multi-gun, set it to assault rifle mode, and sprayed the Snowman with
some rapid fire.
“Yes!” cried Cricket.
Again, the Snowman’s Kevlar reinforced armored exoskeleton protected him. But
it was no fun being slammed around by rapid fire. It hurt him, bruised him, and dented
up his idiotic playsuit.
I switched the mode on the multi-gun to RPG and fired a rocket-propelled
grenade at him. (Quickly throwing our deflection field back up as soon as I squeezed the
trigger.)
A WINTER’S TALE
42
The RPG blew up the snowflake floor a few meters in front of him, sending him
tumbling backwards in a big red gout of flame and shrapnel. And when he finally
stumbled to his feet at the far side of the room, blackened and bruised, he decided that
discretion trumped valor and fled the room, following his wretched elves.
I freed Cricket. Cutting her glowing Christmas light bonds with utility knife
blades that emerged from my white armored fingers like the claws of a cat.
She fell into my arms.
It was nice.
“You OK, Kiddo?” I said.
“About as well as can be expected – for being stripped starkers and tied up by a
holiday-themed psycho here at the North Pole,” she said.
“Well. Isn’t this a touching little scene?” a voice boomed from a hidden public
address system.
It was our pal, Jeffrey.
Appearing on a giant round retro TV screen that suddenly lit up the smoking
room. The goddamned thing must have been ten meters in diameter. Somehow, seeing
Jeffrey’s big round Snowman head, I couldn’t help but flash on the Big Head appearance
of the Wizard of Oz in the 1939 MGM movie. I could see a few of his nasty little elves
chortling in the background behind him like evil munchkins.
“I had so hoped little Bug Girl would take up my offer to be my succulent
sidekick. Alas, you can’t always get what you want.”
“Do we have to listen to this?” asked Cricket.
“You want me to blow out the screen?” I asked.
“And now, my insectile adversaries,” Jeffrey said, “In the best over-villain
tradition, I must bid you…adieu.” As his fat, mittened hand hit a touch pad, and the
room began to fill up with a colorful, poisonous, red-and-green gas…
“Ah, blow it out your shorts!” I said, and blew up the TV screen with a burst of
rapid fire.
“That’s great, Boss, you relieving your tensions and all,” said Cricket. “But how
do we get out of here?”
“One second, Babe,” I said.
I tapped a hidden touch pad on the side of my mask, kicking in its gas mask
function. Then pulled a small white mini-compressed air tank off my applicability belt
and stuffed the regulator mouthpiece between Cricket’s heavenly lips.
“Suck on this a while, Babe,” I said.
Then I loaded a rocket in the multi-gun, converted it for a shoulder mounted
launch, and fired it straight up at the ceiling (getting a quick Vajrayana state in and that
deflection field up and running again).
The rocket hit the roof, blowing out a large ragged chunk of the great idiotic
cartoon igloo into the star-lit winter sky. White plastic “snow” bricks and blue anodized
steel beams rained down on the park. The building smoked and burned. A funnel of
mephitic red-and-green gas escaped into the winter air.
A WINTER’S TALE
43
Incredibly, I found a rough blanket nearby to wrap Cricket in. I picked her up,
held her in my arms, and said, “Have I told you lately that I love you?”
She took the mouthpiece out of her mouth long enough to say, “You are such a
romantic dweeb…”
As I rocketed off and leaped to the sky.
We shot out of the great igloo hole with the last of the red-and-green gas, bottom
lit by the remaining flames, and landed on what was left of the roof.
It was snowing hard, the wind whipping it sideways.
“Jesus!” It’s frickin’ cold up here!” Cricket cried.
The white Hopper-Chopper was already flying in, piloted by computer drone. I
guided it in with a remote to land on the roof. (I had it spray the park randomly with
rubber bullets as it came. I was feeling a bit cross.)
The park below was in an uproar: Lights were winking on in the stupid igloo
buildings. Eskimo park thugs in their Captain Cool snow goggles came running. Red
tracer bullets streaked through the indigo night, trying to nail the white Hopper-Chopper
sailing in through the blowing snow like a weird white mechanical dragonfly. The last of
the red-and-green gas escaped from the gaping, shattered roof into the gelid air. And the
whole weird scene was lit by the glowing blue-and-green artificial Northern Lights
drifting like gossamers in the winter sky above.
The great white dragonfly landed and I leaped to it with Cricket in my arms. The
side opened like a Delorian and I stuffed her inside.
Distant sirens were going off. I yelled over the wailing, “Look, Love-of-my-Life,
I want you to stay put. Out of danger. I’m putting a field around the chopper.”
“Uh, last time I checked, we were, like, a team, GH,” she said.
“That’s an order. From your over-hero mentor. Stay put. I don’t want you killed
or maimed or something.”
“No way.”
“Yes,” I said.
And slammed the door shut. I leapt some distance and used the remote to throw a
large deflection field around the Hopper-Chopper. Then leapt to the edge of the shattered
igloo roof, cranked up my Night-Vision and surveyed the scene below.
I could see the Snowman down there, directing his troops. There were multicolored elves, Eskimos wearing their Captain Cool goggles, (Why were they wearing
them at night? Perhaps they functioned as Night-Vision goggles, I mused), and thugs
wearing preposterous park costumes, dressed like anthropomorphic reindeer and moose
like those Mickey and Donald and Goofy costumes at Disneyland. (There was no
apparent reason for this – it was the off-season and there were no park visitors other than
moi – perhaps the outfits were heated or designed with weaponry or something.)
The elves were packing candy cane assault rifles, the Eskimos carried harpoon
guns, and the reindeer and moose appeared to be setting up mortars…
It was time to do battle with Evil.
I leaped off the great dome of the igloo to the park below.
A WINTER’S TALE
44
ACT III
The park thugs opened fire:
The elves with live ammo, the Eskimos with harpoon guns and flamethrowers,
the Snowman with his glittering blue cold ray. The anthropomorphic reindeer shot
electrical bolts from their antlers and the moose shelled the Hopper-Chopper with mortar
fire.
I rocketed through the driving show, through a barrage of bullets and steel
harpoons and jets of fire and crackling white electrical bolts, to land on another stupid
cartoon igloo building. I dodged behind a great glowing candy cane, big as a silo,
blazing red-and-white in the indigo night.
Then leapt off, rocketing through the driving snow once again, just before mortar
fire hit the great candy cane, blowing it to shards of flaming Plexiglas.
I dodged, leaping from weird building to weird building: Santa’s workshop.
Reindeer barns. Giant gift-wrapped presents worthy of Christo. An Ozymandias-sized
sculpture of the Snowman. Ducking behind giant luminescent sugarplums and lollipops
and Christmas stars.
It was a wild scene. Me dodging red tracer bullets and arcing streamers of
crimson fire and the electric-blue blasts of the cold ray, the mortars blowing up giant
glowing lollipops and Christmas stars and gel presents, the artificial Northern Lights
dancing crazily in the sky. I fired back from the rooftops, from behind giant Christmas
ornaments and reindeer sculpture, my multi-gun in assault rifle mode, fed with clips of
rubber bullets, blowing Eskimos and elves and anthropomorphic moose off their feet,
tumbling in white clouds of powdered snow.
But there were just too goddamn many of them for one guy to fight, and I really
wanted to get to the Snowman…
Hiding behind a giant luminous snowflake, I unclipped a softball-sized metal
sphere from my utility harness and ducked out to lob the device into the air over the
Snowman’s evil gang. Then leapt off the building as a mortar blew the great Plexiglas
snowflake to a million diamond fragments.
As I rocketed through the indigo night, drawing fire, my device ignited in the
snow-filled air above the park thugs, exploding like a mini-sun, temporarily blinding the
bastards. (My convex insect goggles temporarily went photo chromic black to protect my
eyes.)
A WINTER’S TALE
45
I landed on the roof of Santa’s Workshop, and, while my adversaries were
blinded, shot the bastards like fish in a barrel with rubber bullets. (I confess that I have
never actually shot fish in a barrel, but I’m guessing that it would be a pretty similar
experience.)
Then, as they began to recover their eyesight, I unhitched another device (this one
about the size of an electric shaver) from my utility harness and lobbed it at them. It
landed in the snow at the center of the mass of colorful criminality and started wailing
like a grunge-rock band. It was the Locust-Buzzer, a device that emits a hypersonic
insectoid buzzing – screeching at a sonic range quite unbearable to the human ear. It
drove the Eskimos and elves and moose and whatnot back, stumbling away in the
blowing, whipping snowfall…
Unfortunately, the Snowman himself was unaffected, his idiotic armored helmet
and high-tech earmuffs blocking the sound.
Even after his henchmen scattered, the Snowman was still firing away at me with
his cold ray. It hit a reindeer sculpture, a tall blazing Christmas tree, a giant lollipop,
encasing them in ice as I leapt and dodged.
It made me cross.
I landed on the roof of another dopey igloo building and fired a rocket out of my
forearm launcher at the bastard. It painted a yellow-white streak through the indigo night
and blew up at his black, buckle-booted feet; sending him tumbling end-over-end like a
great portly slapstick comedian, say Oliver Hardy or John Belushi…
The cold ray flew out of his fat purple mittens and crashed in the snow some
distance away. And before he could retrieve it, I fired an RPG at it from my multi-gun,
blowing it to flaming silver shrapnel…
Pursuing my advantage, I leapt off the igloo, rocketed through the night to land
knee-deep in snow before Jeffrey, and stalked toward him through the driving snowfall…
He rose to confront me.
It was the Moment of Truth. The two great absurd antagonists facing each other
at last – mano a mano – the two of us alone in a Snow Globe…stalking…circling each
other in a nimbus of light…
I had my multi-gun aimed at him with another RPG ready to go; he had his mitten
aimed at me, God knows what weird weapon up his frozen sleeve…
“This is the denouement, Dickhead,” I said.
“Blow it our your shorts, Bug-Boy,” he sneered.
I had him in my sights, began to close my armored finger on the trigger…
…and…
Something grabbed me from behind!
It felt like I’d been grabbed by a forklift, a giant, crushing, steel vise…
I shot a look over my shoulder.
It was a cartoon bear. A giant audio-animatronic polar bear.
A WINTER’S TALE
46
It was wearing a fur-lined purple knit cap with a fluffy white tassel and a fur-lined
purple parka with a big white snowflake design on it. It was also about twelve feet tall
with a titanium-steel armature and had me in a steel-trap bear hug. Its eyes glowed red in
the dark.
It shattered the multi-gun to fragments and was breaking my ribs. Squeezing the
wind out of me. I could no longer breath.
It laughed, “Uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh!” like Goofy, and said, “I want to be your
friend!”
I was blacking out, golden phosphenes exploding before my eyes like champagne
bubble suns, and I thought, “Jesus, what a stupid way to die…”
Somewhere in the darkness, I heard Jeffrey saying, “Good going, Barney! Kill
him!”
A little short on ideas, I jammed my middle finger into a touch pad on the palm of
my armored glove and set off my rocket pack. The blast exploded into the bear’s midsection, scorching the thing, and burning my backside… The bear fell backward, and I
rocketed forward…rolling through the air in a shallow, tumbling arc – half blacking out –
and crashing to the earth, tumbling in a cloud of snow (dousing the fire) – almost to the
edge of an icy, artificial ravine.
Barney the Bear was up on his feet in an instant and stalking after me…
I rose – somewhat wobbly – in the snow, to see the great homicidal audioanimatronic lumbering toward me, parka on fire, jaws opening to reveal impressive steel
fangs, white furry paws reaching for me with alarming steel claws…
[I thought vaguely of Reader’s Digest articles and men’s magazine true-life
adventure stories of hunters set upon by homicidal bears. I flashed on a true-life story of
a bear attack that I’d read a few years ago, written by Tolstoy of all people, an account of
the great Russian writer having his brilliant head chewed on by a bear during a bear-huntgone-bad in the Russian winter. These thoughts were unwelcome.]
The audio-animatronic came at me like Frankenstein’s monster out of the
blowing, whipping snow.
“I want to be your friend!!” it bellowed, this time a bit more enthusiastically.
It swung on me with a steel claw, raking my heated armored suit, tearing through
Kevlar, and drawing blood…
And – without thinking – I grabbed its furry steel arm, treated it like a very big
guy, and used its own momentum against it with a Basic Drop Throw – flipping it neatly
away from me – to tumble down into the ice ravine in a cloud of white powdery snow.
“Aw…fuck,” said Jeffrey.
Stupid audio-animatronic bears, I thought. They never expect Judo.
But…as I was catching my painful breath, congratulating myself, and raising my
forearm launcher to shoot a rocket at Barney down in the ravine and finish him off, I
heard a great bellow behind me and whirled to see…
An audio-animatronic walrus loping at me…!
A WINTER’S TALE
47
A monstrous thing…big as a bulldozer… heavy as a gas-guzzling, oversized
SUV… roaring over the tundra like a freight train…trailing powdered snow…great ivory
(unquestionably steel) tusks flashing in the moonlight…
I thought: I hate this night.
And sidestepped the goddamn thing like a matador…
But one of its tusks sideswiped me as it past… It knocked me to the ground – its
titanium-steel tusk cutting right through my Kevlar armor and goring my right side – a
sudden stream of red blood spattering my white winter Grasshopper suit…spurting hot on
the white crystal snow…
I yelped (screamed, really) and rolled in the snow, coming to rest – Hey, there is a
God – right next to one of those high-tech harpoon guns dropped by the retreating
Eskimos…
I grabbed the harpoon gun, whirled and hunkered in a firing crouch…as the
monstrous robot – all greasy brown fur spread over a titanium frame – wild dead-machine
eyes – spun in a crystal spray of powdered snow and charged me again like a clockwork
rhino…
KRACK!
The harpoon gun launched a steel spike in a burst of compressed gas…flying like
a silver rocket…
It tore right through the audio-animatronic walrus…flying out the other side – the
beast’s Swiss watch mechanisms erupting in flame and sparks, a spray of silver coils and
springs, transformers and microchips – to impact in the white Plexiglas wall of one of
those ubiquitous cartoon igloo buildings…
The flashing, sparking, dying thing was still crawling after me -- its head
crunching up and down with its great titanium tusks like a factory metal puncher -coming at me across the park in the blowing snowstorm, chewing up the frozen earth…
I fired a rocket at it from my forearm launcher, blowing it to fiery shrapnel…
Again, I caught my breath. It hurt to breath. I feared that Barney had cracked a
rib or two.
I touched a hidden touch pad on the side of my white suit, now Jackson Pollockspattered with bright red. A sudden hiss – and the Wetware SmartSuit function went to
work, closing up the area over the audio-animatronic bear and walrus wounds,
establishing a vacuum, forcing pressure to staunch to bleeding, adding in an antibiotic
and giving me a shot of morphine. I thanked God for my design team.
But my suit’s electronic heating system had gone dead. I was suddenly, very
uncomfortably aware that it was twenty below here in the happy Adirondacks.
No matter, I thought. My armored suit should keep me from freezing to death.
Although, I was going to be cold. And when you’re doing heavy exercise, like fighting
for your life against an emotionally disturbed over-villain and giant killer audioanimatronics, it’s best to stay warm so that you don’t strain or sprain your muscles. Ah,
well – no matter – it’s not a perfect world, now is it?
A WINTER’S TALE
48
My thoughts were a fuzzy whirl of pain and anger and morphine and outright
disbelief at the sheer weirdness of the night. [What am I doing here? What am I doing
with my life? I should be home in bed. Getting some rest. Preparing to teach my next
semester of classes at Riddell.] When I was cold-cocked from behind – knocked silly,
really – tumbling in a cloud of crystal white snow…
Pain.
I felt like I’d been whacked in the back of the head with a baseball bat. I
crumpled to the ground and clutched my skull. It throbbed. I could barely focus.
I rose, angry, spun in a fighting crouch to confront…
A giant audio-animatronic Gingerbread Man.
The thing loomed in the moonlight, lit by the crazy Northern Lights, twelve-feettall and steel-framed.
“You can’t catch me; I’m the Gingerbread Man!” it said.
I cursed the science of robotics. I cursed Imagineering. I cursed Walt Disney.
“Aww, fuck,” I said.
And, as I rose to my feet – somewhat wobbly, stunned, probably in shock,
wondering if I had a concussion – the goddamn thing rushed forward, faster than a cobra,
and whapped me upside my insectoid head with a karate chop…
Phosphenes went off in my head like flashbulbs. I blacked out and rolled in a
cloud of snow like a dog hit by a car.
I came to – pain-pain-pain – and shook it off just in time to see long silver sword
blades easing out of Mr. Gingerbread Man’s hand like a set of giant cat claws. He
anticipated back and then brought them down fast, attempting to skewer me to the frozen
ground. I had just enough presence of mind to roll out of their path in the snow
--although his thumb-blade grazed my left side, cutting through the Kevlar, drawing
blood, and slashing my left hip…
“Aaaaghh!” I said.
The twelve-foot Gingerbread monstrosity yanked his steel sword fingers from the
iron earth, straightened up like a giant Gumby, and said, “Hahahahahahaha!! This is
fun!!”
Then he aimed his other hand at me…and shot flame out of the fingers…
The flames hit me and I was knocked back, off my feet, tumbling and yowling in
the snow, enveloped in jellied gasoline.
My Kevlar suit protected me from most of it; I rolled in the snow, which put it out
pretty quickly, but I felt like I’d been barbequed, felt numerous blistering scald-burns
under my white armor (large sections of which were now blackened like I was a victim of
Cajun cooking).
And pain. More pain. Real honest-to-Christ-pain, Dear Reader. Burns are about
the most excruciating kind of pain, now aren’t they? I came out of the roll, somehow got
to my feet, lacerated and scalded, unquestionably in shock, in time to see several large
dark shadows converging on me in the creepy emerald-sapphirine light.
A WINTER’S TALE
49
I looked up and said, “Oh, nooo…”
I was now surrounded by an audio-animatronic Gingerbread Family…a sort of
Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis of the audio-animatronic Gingerbread World…
Karate Sensei-Sword Finger-Flamethrower Gingerbread Man was the Papa, with
a sort of frosting Chef’s hat and a frosting bow tie; there was a ten-foot Gingerbread
Mom with squiggly frosting hair and a frosting hemline, and Buddy & Sis, the
Gingerbread siblings, were perhaps half the size of Mom & Dad, which still made the
fuckers, like, six-feet-tall…
“Don’t tell me,” I muttered. “You all want to be my friend.”
Buddy & Sis chimed in, in harmony, “Let’s have some more fun!!” which I took
to be indicative of hostile intentions. And they all began popping their plum-sized candy
buttons at me. Colors of red and purple and baby blue flew through the air…
And, with those fat, happy buttons incoming, I thought, with a sort of Alan Watts
– Zen in the Art of Over-Heroing – grasping all-at-once thought: Well, fuck this. I can
fly. And leapt skyward, rocketing out of the Gingerbread Family’s trap.
Good thing, too. The buttons were plastic explosives. They erupted in the dark
below me in bright gouts of red-orange flame, (and accidentally took out poor Buddy,
who blew apart in an explosion of latex and clockwork mechanisms spraying across the
snow).
But, as it turned out, I hadn’t properly considered the inventiveness of Jeffrey’s
Imagineering team – as Papa Gingerbread Man looked up, candy eyes glowing an eerie
crimson, and shot a laser out of those eyes at me…
The beam hit my right shoulder…cutting right through it. (At first I didn’t
register any pain…just a sort of punch to the shoulder…and then, WHAM-O, the pain
flooded in…)
But, fortunately, the wound wasn’t deep into the deltoid. It was fairly close to the
surface and I still seemed to have use of the arm. I hit another touch pad and the
SmartSuit sealed off my new wounds and gave me a fresh hit of morphine.
I leveled off…and landed on the roof of a building with a giant Christmas tree lit
up like one of Liberace’s candelabras and long red-and-green Christmas stockings
hanging to the snow-covered ground below.
Knee deep in snow, I took careful aim, muttered, “Fuck you and the cookie tray
you rode in on,” and fired the last of my rockets from my forearm launcher, blowing
away the remaining members of the homicidal Gingerbread family. They exploded into
high-arcing trails of flaming shrapnel and Swiss watch mechanisms and fragments of
latex cartoon heads and limbs.
“Now that was fun,” I said.
No doubt, the Perspicacious Reader will wonder what happened to Jeffrey, when all this
insanity was going down, my serial battles with the wacky, heartwarming audioanimatronic denizens of his colorful theme park.
A WINTER’S TALE
50
Jeffrey had had the time to take an exterior Plexiglas elevator that ran up one side
of the frozen waterfall. The elevator looked like a Christmas ornament – a big stylized
snowflake design – with a spherical central area with big Plexiglas spikes radiating from
it. It gave off a soft glow, painting the cascading blue-white crystal permutations of the
artificial falls with warm, golden light as it rose.
The Snowman rode it to the top…where there was a Roger Dean fantasy bridge
up there for the tourists, studded with those pay-per-view binocular telescope-on-a-stick
things.
There was also a big, anti-aircraft-sized gun mounted up there.
I became aware of this, as, suddenly, I was being fired upon. And I looked up to
see Jeffrey at the top of the falls, now wearing a colorful backpack, weird weapons
hanging off the straps, firing this big Jack Kirby-issue gun at me. And, as the incoming
fire crashed into the rooftops around me, blowing up giant glowing Plexiglas candy canes
and gumdrops, I realized that the huge gun was firing giant icicle spears – these big
honking diamond-hard iridescent missiles were impacting into the rooftops, sending up
geysers of powdered crystal snow.
I thought: What in God’s name does he have a thing like that at the park for?
Hunting bio-engineered mastodons? I mean, one of those ice spears would impact right
through a human being. Why didn’t he use regular ammo?
Whatever. I had had all I could stand of this evil dickhead.
I pulled my silver-white .44 Automag from my white side holster and blasted off –
leaping into the winter night – rocketing to the top of the fantasy ice falls – dodging great
flashing flying icicles on the wing – (feeling like Death-Warmed-Over) – to confront the
Snowman for the Final Battle…
*
*
*
At this juncture in the story, we cut back to Cricket in the Hopper-Chopper.
She is not behaving herself.
She’s geared-up in a spare white winter Cricket uniform. It’s got this full-face
knit mask, exposing her eyes, lower jaw and fabulous lips (a bit like Batgirl’s cowl), a big
scarf coiled around her neck, this big-lapelled, double-breasted, knee-length winter coat,
thermal leotards on those heavenly legs, and shiny action go-go boots. The whole
ensemble is Kevlar reinforced, of course.
Mom would want me to dress warmly, she thinks. It’s like twenty frigging below
out there.
She straps on her jetpack and grabs a shoulder bag of Cricket Tricks: various cool
new weapons that Team Locust has cooked up for her.
A WINTER’S TALE
51
She hits a touch pad on the Hopper-Chopper dash, lowering the deflection field
during a momentary lull in the mortar fire, and flies out into the night.
The Hopper-Chopper had smelled of oil and steel and leather and vinyl; the winter
night smells clean and fresh, redolent of snow and pine, although occasionally riven by
smoke and chemical and scorched metal smells from all the recent explosions.
The wind is dying down but the snow is still falling steadily in big fat sparkling
flakes. The whole weird park is lit by the lime fluorescence of the artificial Northern
Lights and the rainbow glow from the countless glowing Plexiglas candy canes and
gumdrops studding the snow-mantled pathways below.
Cricket hails her Mentor and True Love, the Grasshopper, on her cell phone
headset rig. “Hey GH!” she says. “Just thought you should know – I’ve gone out!
Figure you needed help!”
“I told you to stay put!” the Bold Grasshopper responds.
“Don’t be a parental unit,” Cricket chides. “Like, where are you?”
“Heading up to the top of the ice falls. The Snowman is up there.”
“Good. I’d like to kill him.”
“Go back to the chopper!”
“Umm. It looks like some of the Bad Guys are regrouping over in Candy Town.
Hey, they’re wearing moose costumes! Wicked cool! They look like Bullwinkle!”
“Look, Kiddo…”
“I’ll take them out!”
“No-no-no… Look, Kiddo, I really want you to – “
“Cricket out!”
CLICK.
Ah, Restless Youth.
And, yes, a contingent of park thugs, those elves and Eskimos and reindeer and moose,
have rallied from being blinded and driven off by the Locust-Buzzer. They are now
wearing rifle range ear guards and army surplus night vision goggles. They hear Cricket
rocketing through the park, a cry goes up, and they open fire.
Cricket dodges the sudden incoming fire: bullets and harpoons and electrical
bolts.
One of the moose activates a remote control device and aims it at an igloo, the top
of which opens like the lid of a kitchen garbage can. And a cloud of giant snowflakes
and globular Christmas ornaments float out, filling the winter air.
Floating mines.
Cricket is sharp enough to realize that whatever they are, they’re no good. She
zips and dodges through the floating holiday minefield like playing a video game.
A WINTER’S TALE
52
She lands on the roof of a snow-frosted building, hiding behind that giant
Ozymandias-like sculpture of the Snowman. She zaps a couple of the holiday air-mines
with her stingers. They blow up.
She thinks: Yeah, figured they weren’t there to increase my life expectancy.
Behind the Ozymandias sculpture of the Snowman, Cricket reaches into her
shoulder bag of Cricket Tricks, pulls out an art deco sphere about the size of a cantaloupe,
and then leans out quickly to hurl it to the ground below. It impacts in the snow before
the park thugs firing up at her.
The device opens like a clam. And releases a swarm of robot insects, flying with
little buzzing insectoid wings. It’s like releasing a swarm of mechanical wasps.
This is one of Walter and Kenny’s coolest inventions, Cricket thinks.
The silver wasps streak through the snowy winter air, scattering, and zeroing in on
the park thugs like heat-seeking mini-missiles, one robot wasp per costumed thug…
They extrude silver proboscis needles in flight… And they sting the park thugs -injecting them with a nice animal tranquilizer – a sodium pentathal-angel dust cocktail –
sending the homicidal elves and Eskimos and reindeer and moose off to Never-Never
Land.
Cricket zips out from behind the great Snowman sculpture and (dodging the
sparkling, floating holiday mine field) rockets to her wonderful mentor, the Grasshopper,
whom she disobeyed.
She arrives at the icefalls: all cascading curtains of great glittering multi-story
icicles glowing sapphire and emerald from the crazy Northern Lights. There’s a big
frozen pond at the base of it, and on its snowy shore, big high-tech searchlights are aimed
up at the top, where she sees the brave Grasshopper, hovering alongside, dodging crazily,
as the Snowman fires giant icicles at him from an anti-aircraft-sized gun.
The Grasshopper fires back between icicle barrages with a high-powered
automatic handgun, the bullets sparking and bouncing off the Snowman’s armored suit.
She hears him on her headphone, taunting the Snowman, “Careful, pal; you could put
somebody’s eye out with that thing…”
There are also a few park thugs in Walrus costumes that the Stun-Wasps missed,
down by the searchlights, looking like they wandered out of The Magical Mystery Tour
and firing up at the Grasshopper with harpoon guns. Cricket, feeling her oats, comes
sailing down to the ice pond, silver skate blades emerging from the soles of her combat
go-go boots, and she comes in for a landing, skating at freeway speed across the ice,
firing off stun darts from her forearm launcher, taking out the lot of them.
“Eat angel dust, Cartoon Animal Guys!” she cries.
And the anthropomorphic Walrus-thugs are knocked backward, flying through the
air, to crash in graceless heaps in the deep snow, dead to the world.
Cricket does a graceful turn on the ice and rockets back up into the air to aid the
Love of her Life in taking out Jeffrey. But as she jets through the gelid air
(congratulating herself at taking out the entire Eskimo/elf/reindeer/moose/walrus park
thug contingent), a giant audio-animatronic Orca – big as a Metro line car – leaps out of a
A WINTER’S TALE
53
hole in the ice at the base of the frozen falls, soaring almost ten meters in the air, and
snaps at her like housecat leaping to catch a bird on the wing, narrowly missing her as
she pulls up fast…
“Jesus!!” she cries. “It’s Free Willy! And he’s hungry!”
The great black-and-white smiling audio-animatron drops away, trailing a spray
of silver-white ice water in the moonlight, and crashing back down into the pond.
Jeffrey calls down, “Hey, Bug Girl – meet Bruce!”
Cricket alights, clinging to the side of the falls, and catches her breath…
As the giant homicidal Muppet bursts up through the ice once again, trailing a
silver tsunami, and snaps at her with smiling white titanium-steel teeth, as she takes off
like a winter bird…
The preposterous, but deadly audio-animatronic continues leaping and snapping at
Cricket as she weaves and bobs and dips and dodges like a hummingbird to avoid its
teeth.
And, at the same time, the evil Jeffrey swivels the great icicle gun (actually
designed for the audio-animatronic Orca show as it turned out) to fire down at the
beautiful young sidekick as Free Willy tries to eat her…
The heroic Grasshopper of course is already descending to rescue Cricket,
spraying fire at Free Willy from his Automag, attempting to hit it in the eye socket and
take out its computer brain…
But Cricket holds her own.
She cries, “Hey Shamu, chew on this!” and drops a high explosive down the giant
homicidal Muppet’s smiling gullet as it makes a flying leap at her. And the thing erupts,
blowing apart, raining flaming debris over the icy pond, lighting up the crystal falls with
reflected red-and-orange-and-yellow, sending great artificial icicles crashing to the pond
below…
Jeffrey looks down in dismay and says, “Fuck a duck, Babe! That thing cost more
than the Gross National Product of most Third World countries!” He fingers a touch pad
on the strap harness of his colorful backpack and says, “I’ve gotta do something to keep
you busy Bug Girl, so I can take out Bug Guy, here once and for all. Time to call out…
the exterminators!”
And down below, in the weird nocturnal park, hidden speakers begin playing
Tchaikowsky’s Nutcracker Suite.
Hidden doors open in a snowy town made of candy and cookies and frosting, and
toy wooden soldiers and sugarplum fairies and teddy bears emerge, rolling on hidden
tracks that spiral and snake through the park. They’re life size – about six-feet-tall – stiff
wooden soldiers in crimson 19th century dress uniforms and tall black furry busbies,
whirling sugarplum fairy ballerinas with glittering golden crowns and pink-circle-painted
cheeks and frilly white tutus, and friendly, furry, button-eyed teddy bears; and they’re
dancing through the park past the glowing gumdrops and candy canes on their hidden
tracks as the over-familiar strains of Tchaikowsky’s Christmas ballet echo through the
frozen air, and the crazed Northern Lights shimmer and blaze in the winter sky…
A WINTER’S TALE
54
The hovering Cricket looks down at the performance and mutters, “Whoa… Mad
cool…”
Then the toy soldiers raise their wooden carbines, the sugarplum fairies raise their
sparkling silver wands, and the teddy bears produce popguns and the dancing audioanimatronics commence firing en mass at Cricket.
“Jesus!” she cries, as the winter night air is suddenly full of streams of red tracer
bullets…
Cricket takes cover in Candy Town, ducking and dodging the fire (and the last of
those floating Christmas ornament mines), shooting around the bonbon domes of stacked
cookie towers and candy stick streetlights, zooming past second story porches with
railings of white frosting and ornate chocolate grillwork, zipping around Christmas trees
made of scalloped green frosting and trimmed with cake icing and glowing cartoon candy
dots, flying through a glittering layer cake carousel, past candy cane poles supporting
life-size animal cracker animals, to finally take shelter atop a wooden lodge, hiding
behind a giant sculpture of Santa hugging a glowing red-nosed Rudolf, as the incoming
scarlet streams of fire zero in on her…
*
*
*
Meanwhile, up there at the top of the falls, the Snowman swiveled his icicle gun around
to fire at me.
“Die, Bug Man, die!!” he cried.
But the thing started making an impotent clicking sound. It was out of icicle
ammo.
“Jesus God, Joseph, fucking Mary!!” Jeffrey muttered in exasperation.
And, unfortunately, as cruel fate would have it, I ran out of ammo for the
Automag at about the same time, having emptied the magazine, spraying fire at Free
Willy.
I hovered alongside the crystal falls and radioed Cricket. “Stay out of the line of
fire, Kiddo,” I said.
“Like what else can I do?” she responded from somewhere behind Santa.
“I’m going in to take out Frosty.”
I landed on top of the icefalls, on the Roger Dean ice bridge, and began to move
in on the Snowman…
You are such a rockin’ over-hero, Bug Man,” he said, taking off his black shiny
top hat, “I doff my hat to you!”
He swung his arm back like a discus thrower and sneered, “Let’s play us a little
Frisbee!” and threw the hat at me like Oddjob in Goldfinger.
A WINTER’S TALE
55
And, as the hat spun through the air like a flying saucer, it extruded a spinning,
diamond-tipped circular saw blade…
I leapt, blasting off…a bit too slow, as the hat-saw clipped by armored calf just
above my steel-shod boots. Diamond rip-teeth cut through the Kevlar, slicing my calf…
I made a heroic quip in the air – something like “Eeuuarrghh!!” and rocketed
forward…landing closer to Jeffrey on the glittering ice bridge…hobbled now…
stumbling…bleeding from my leg into my white winter Grasshopper suit…bright red
blood splattering on the crystal white snow and ice.
“Hah! Gotcha El Bugo!” Jeffrey cried.
“Ahh…go fuck yourself…” I retorted.
I bent down, hit a touch pad on the leg of my suit, and, again, the intelligent
Wetware sealed off the wound with a vacuum, hopefully staunching the blood flow…
But, I seemed to be walking funny…limping, now.
God, I’m growing to hate that man, I thought.
Then the Snowman pulled a black umbrella from a scabbard on the shoulder strap
of his colorful backpack. He pressed a red button on the handle and it extended a long
thin hedge clipper blade with icicle diamond rip-teeth. Another push of the button and it
began to roar like a chainsaw.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “That is ridiculous.”
And I shot my wrist laser from my forearm armament housing. I drew back with
the thin red beam…and neatly lopped the rotating blade off the Snowman’s stupid
umbrella.
Jeffrey tilted his wacky Snowman head to a jaunty angle and said, “What? You
think you’re some kind of Jedi, Bug Boy?”
Then he pressed a button on the handle of his umbrella and it shot out a laser.
“Two can play at that game, pal!”
And the two of us fought it out there on the rim of the ice falls with our lasers like
a couple of trademarked characters in one of George Lucas’s ubiquitous movies…
Except of course, the lasers didn’t hum and clash like electric broadswords the
way light sabers do in the movies. The red beams just went right through each other.
And the beams were a lot longer, of course. Jeffrey and I were sort of hacking and
chopping at each other, trying to poke each other’s eyes out, whacking through huge
Plexiglas icicles that fell crashing to the ice pond below, playing out our operatic death
dance to the strains of the Nutcracker Suite filling the winter air, lit by the emerald and
sapphire Northern Lights dancing overhead.
I had to leap like my namesake to avoid being sliced like luncheon meat by
Jeffrey’s laser, as did Jeffrey, who it turned out could leap and dodge remarkably well for
a guy in a fat, ridiculous armored exoskeleton snowman suit…
*
*
*
A WINTER’S TALE
56
Meanwhile, down below, on the roof, as tracer bullets chip away at Santa and blow out
Rudolf’s red blinking nose, Cricket sits cross-legged in the snow, calmly working a small
palm pilot-like device. And Cricket, being Generation Cyber, was born playing computer
games. She’s hacked her way into the main server computer that controls all the park’s
audio-animatronics.
She wishes her handsome and brave Grasshopper wasn’t up there on the icefalls
in such close proximity to the evil Jeffrey or she’d reprogram the dancing Nutcracker
Army to fire en mass at the loathsome fuck… She settles for shutting down the system.
The all-too-familiar music abruptly ceases, the toy soldiers and sugarplum fairies and
teddy bears cease firing, and then slump and bow as their tracks grind to a halt…
“Yes!” she cries.
*
*
*
While back up on the ice falls, I finally got the best of the Snowman…cutting through his
umbrella-laser and burning his fat, mittened hand.
“Eeeyyyauggghhh!!” he shrieked, dropping his laser. “Jesus H. Fucking Christ!!”
You hostile motherfucker!!”
“Time to surrender, Dickhead,” I said. “Or we find out if this laser can cut
through that stupid exoskeleton of yours.”
“Fuck you, Bug Guy!” Jeffrey responded wittily.
He reached for the weapons hanging from his backpack’s shoulder straps and
grabbed what appeared to be a string of white popcorn and red cranberries. He drew
back and cried, “Have some Christmas popcorn, Bug Boy!” and hurled the popcorn string
at me like a bola…
…and then leaped off the falls!!
I had been dealing with this asshole long enough to know that whatever that string
was, it wasn’t intended to increase my lifespan, so I also leaped, rocketing into the air
back to the edge of the falls…
…as the popcorn plastique exploded with a big BARRROOOMMM…
…blowing away most of the top of the ice falls, shattering the crystal bridge,
sending huge artificial icicles hurling to the ice pond below…
And flattening me into a cliff face of black siltstone and shale sheathed in
opalescent ice and powdered snow…smashing me painfully into my own jetpack. (And,
of course, all the goddamned explosions of the night should have deafened me, except
that my SmartSuit automatically plugs my ears if sound reaches into dangerous decibel
range).
A WINTER’S TALE
57
I stumbled to my feet in the smoke and fire and falling ice and clouds of snow, to
see Jeffrey sailing through the air, away from the shattered falls, with some sort of airship
hang glider. (Later, Cricket told me his backpack rig had morphed like a Japanese
Transformer robot into the flying rig.) It was an appropriately seasonal rig with green
mistletoe wings and red-and-white Christmas berry running lights – a Tim Burton sort of
design – with a lighter-than-air balloon attachment like a great glittering gold Christmas
ornament.
I made to go after him, but the impact of the rock and ice had wrecked my
jetpack; when I started it up, it sputtered like a recalcitrant lawnmower and shot fire off to
one side at a weird angle…setting the back of my costume on fire. I yelled, “Jesus
God!!” and rolled in a cloud of powdered snow putting it out.
And, truth to tell, I was barely holding on up there at the top of the falls anyway.
I rose from my bed of fire and ice, weaving and wobbling, and my old friends the
phosphenes were back, exploding like birthing suns before my eyes. I was woozy and
disoriented from loss of blood, multiple lacerations and burns, probably a fractured rib or
two, perhaps a concussion, unquestionably shock, and I felt a couple of steps off from
reality from an oncoming cold or flu…
I wobbled to the edge of the shattered icefalls to watch Jeffrey sail away through
the winter night, the weird sapphire and emerald fluorescence of the artificial Northern
Lights reflecting off his white Snowman suit.
He called back, “So long, Bug Guy! I’m looking forward to a rematch. I’ll work
up some new toys – some DDT or a big flyswatter or something!”
*
*
*
But, this is not Jeffrey’s night.
As he sails away, in mid, gentle flight, a small thin silver rocket, one of dear
Cricket’s Cricket Stingers, blows up his lighter-than-air Christmas ornament balloon, and
his glider goes cascading out of control, falling, tumbling like a bird with a broken wing,
to the park below…
Jeffrey comes in for a nasty, rocky landing, crashing his Christmas glider into the
glowing Plexiglas candy canes and gumdrops studding the park, arc lights exploding,
tumbling in the deep cold snow. He unstraps himself, and rises painfully from the
colorful debris…as a long shadow falls over him…
And he turns to see…Barney, his own twelve-foot-tall, homicidal, audioanimatronic polar bear looming over him and looking distinctly hostile…
He hears, “Sic ‘im, Teddy!” and looks up to see Cricket hovering overhead,
controlling the goddamn thing with her palm pilot, like a kid with a computer game…
A WINTER’S TALE
58
And the bear whacks Jeffrey a good one with a titanium-steel claw – smashing
through his Snowman helmet – hopefully giving him a concussion – half tearing it off so
we can see the dazed, terrified Jeffrey Ice in his raccoon eye makeup beneath.
Barney swipes at him again with his steel claws, and Jeffrey takes off running, as
the robot bear chases him to the periphery of the park…and into the snow-covered forest
beyond…
Cricket would like to fly after Jeffrey, zapping him with her stingers, but it’s much
more important that she fly to the top of the ice falls and come to the aid of her handsome
and brave Lover & Mentor, the Grasshopper…
*
*
*
“Uhaughrr…” I said, trying to straighten up. “My back is in big time spasm.”
“I’d really like to go kill, Jeffrey,” Cricket said. “But it looked like you needed
help, Pussycat.”
“Good…Ahhoww…thinking,” I said.
“Bet you’re glad I disobeyed you now, huh?” Cricket said.
“Well, yeah…ahhh…but, generally speaking, obedience in a female is a good
thing.”
“Screw you, Love-of-my-Life.”
“OK by me…”
And, together, we stood at the rim of the ruined icefalls and watched the audioanimatronic polar bear chase Jeffrey off into the distance…loping after him…swatting
crazily at him with its big steel claws… snapping at him with cold steel teeth…both the
white bear and white Snowman lit by the weird, garish electric blue-and-green Northern
Lights.
“Rad,” Cricket observed with a musical laugh.
And I finished: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”
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59
EPILOGUE ONE:
WELL, SOMEONE’S GOT TO CLEAN UP THIS MESS
Cricket and I stood at the top of the great shattered icefalls and surveyed the park.
What to do now?
In my mind, I envisioned Cricket and I flying over the winter forest in the
Hopper-Chopper, tracking Jeffrey down with a heat sensor.
I envisioned some small Adirondack town police station and a couple of bemused
cops looking up to see the Snowman’s Gang being lowered from the white iridescent
dragonfly chopper, all gift-wrapped in shimmering white insect cocoons and tied with a
big red holiday bow.
And the victorious Grasshopper and Cricket, flying off into the sparkling winter
night, snow coruscating like quartz crystals, stars glittering like cold fire…perhaps while
the end credits rolled…
But reality intruded.
There were just too goddamned many of the evil bastards for that scenario.
And they were all spread out through the park, unconscious, stunned out of their
gourds, thanks to Cricket’s robot Stun-Wasps, lying in deep snow in the sub-zero winter
night in their cute little elf and Eskimo and reindeer and moose and walrus costumes. We
couldn’t just leave them there, as they’d unquestionably freeze to death by morning.
It was a conundrum.
In my battered and lacerated and burned condition, I was barely conscious myself,
and it was hard to imagine Cricket and I picking up all those henchpersons and dragging
them indoors before frostbite set in. We’d be here all night.
(Idly, I wondered if those dumb park-animal suits had internal heating systems.
Maybe we could just leave them. Then, I daydreamed fuzzily about having Walter and
Kenny design us some work robots for this sort of thing. In my head, they looked sort of
humanoid and retro and cool looking, like something out of a Silver Age Superman
comic drawn by the great Curt Swan.)
Happily, we were relieved of the problem.
There was the sound of distant sirens. Coming closer.
Apparently, having half-a-hundred explosions and tens of thousands of small arms
rounds going off in the park had attracted some attention in the nearby towns of Hawkeye
and Black Brook and The North Pole and so on, and whatever fire departments and
paramedics and police they had on hand were converging on the park…
We figured we could call it “a job well done” and split.
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60
Cricket used a remote to guide the Hopper-Chopper up to the top of the icefalls,
and we climbed aboard and took off. As we rose above the smoking ruin of the park, lit
by those creepy noctilucent lights, we looked down to see the coruscating lights of fire
trucks and ambulances and squad cars arriving on the scene.
I tried to imagine what they’d make of the mess without much success…
*
*
*
In the days to come, keeping track of the local news, we discovered that a disheartening
number of the park thugs had been released. There was, apparently, no law against
dressing up as a reindeer or a moose or a walrus and being discovered lying unconscious
in a theme park. But a gratifying number of the bastards had previous criminal records,
were wanted in connection with some crime-or-another, and a good portion of them were
in violation of parole, which invariably forbids the use of military small arms,
flamethrowers, shoulder-mounted missile launchers, mortars and the like.
The Hopper-Chopper was identified as ours upon leaving the park, and,
unfortunately, the Grasshopper and Cricket came in for the usual media bashing for being
the over-the-top, cartoonish vigilantes that we are.
This time, we were even accused of being anti-Christmas for our assault on a
holiday theme park.
Cricket, watching an attractive, blonde-haired, female, reactionary opinion-slinger
on Fox News, raving and frothing about the Grasshopper and Cricket being “Christmashaters” and “liberal anti-Christmas Nazis”, muttered “I’d like to see her tied up naked in
Christmas lights by some asshole in a Snowman suit…”
And I concurred, “Yes, I could go for that…”
*
*
*
Jeffrey Ice, the Snowman himself, had vanished, and the TV news and the papers were
full of “Billionaire Industrialist Disappears” stories.
Cricket said she hoped that he had frozen to death in the winter Adirondack forest.
But, all things being equal, given life’s essential perverseness, I fully expect Mr. Ice to
return some future winter day for a return engagement. Perhaps with a new name like
Deep Freeze or Doctor Permafrost or the Ice-Master or something.
A WINTER’S TALE
61
EPILOGUE TWO:
ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS CRICKET
Christmas came. So did Zoë.
Silent night. Winter night. Candlelight.
Enya plays on a loop on the CD player.
Zoë lies on her back, nude, her teenage body golden in the candlelight. Soft taupe
shadows sculpt her form: soft, round, voluptuous, yet muscular.
I have a finger in her fat, plump labia. She’s wet. I gently massage her hidden
pink little clitoris as she softly moans.
I’m nude myself…in a long red-and-green striped kimono she gave me for
Christmas. It doesn’t impede my erection. I’ve got a tremendous erection watching Zoë
writhe.
She’s really into it.
It takes a while to bring Zoë to orgasm.
She writhes and moans happily.
(We’re in the big old master bedroom in Locust Manor. On our King-sized bed
with the built-in bookcases.)
As Zoë approaches orgasm, she throws her adorable, chestnut-haired head back
on the pillow and thrashes it from side-to-side, her mouth (wet, pink lips) forming a little
‘O’…
And when she comes, I can see the muscles spasm under the flesh of her tummy,
starting in her soft, round pubic mound with it’s red-gold pubic hair (the prettiest color
I’ve ever seen) and shooting up her petite body like an earthquake to her ripe little
breasts…her back arching like she’s getting electro-shock therapy. And she always does
that thing where she thrashes her head back-and-forth on the pillow, eyes closed…just
before she gasps and has a big ol’ orgasm…
Afterwards, she cuddles like a kitten on my chest. (I’ve always thought that
cuddling after sex was the best part of making love.)
And we whisper the obligatory sweet nothings. Shakespeare, in Romeo and
Juliet, wrote: “How silver-sweet sound lovers tongues at night…like softest music to
attending ears…”
I always thought that was the best thing ever written on the way lovers speak in
the act of love. It certainly captured it with Zoë and me…
A WINTER’S TALE
62
Zoë peaks over my shoulder as I write this. She says, “Whoa… Have we taken to writing
porn, Daddy?”
And I assure her that I’m just writing this vignette as a warm-up. That I’ll delete
it later, and no one but us will ever read it…
*
*
*
But…I’m getting ahead of myself in our story.
Let’s backtrack:
Upon our return to the Greater Forest City Area from the Adirondacks, I checked
in for an emergency visit with the Team Locust physician, Doctor Silver.
Doc Silver is a brilliant and wonderful GP practicing in Forest City. His office is
in one of those fabulous 19th century gingerbread houses in the rolling farmland on the
edge of town.
Doc is an integral part of Team Locust, looking after Cricket’s and my health
needs. (Especially, the hard-to-explain-to-the-authorities emergency heath needs that
arise in the over-hero racket – one can’t just drive the old Hopper-Car up to the Locust
County General Hospital and check into the emergency ward with a variety of strange
lacerations and burns and fractures and gunshot and laser wounds without inviting some
unwelcome questions.)
Doc Silver is this wonderful, exuberant, old Jewish guy. He looks exactly like
Santa Claus.
And is an immensely kind and skilled GP who treats hundreds of poor people in
the Greater Forest City Area for next to nothing. Doc maintains that it is a national
disgrace the way some 47 million people in the American Imperium have no health
insurance while the military-industrial-petroleum complex sucks up four or five hundred
billion dollars a year prosecuting its endless wars. (I’ve put his practice on the Team
Locust payroll, so I’ve been subsidizing his good work.)
Cricket landed the Hopper-Chopper on the helipad in the woods out behind his house just
before dawn and hauled me in on a snowmobile.
Doc was a bit appalled at all my multiple injuries and spent the morning putting
me back together, patching me up for the holidays.
A WINTER’S TALE
63
Sometime after noon, Cricket, in her secret identity of Zoë Peak, drove us back to
Locust Manor, and we both tumbled into bed, cuddled up together with Zoë’s cats, Anime
and Manga, in the big aircraft carrier-sized bed with the built-in bookcase in the elegant
2nd story master bedroom, and slept for about 18 hours.
*
*
*
I did indeed come down with the flu, this sort of cold/flu hybrid, but I’ve had worse. I
was completely flattened for about three days. And then there was a recovery period
where I was up and around, but in a weakened state, where I would occasionally drift off
and not be exactly sure where I was.
Miraculously, Zoë didn’t come down with it, and while I was useless, she
somehow managed to get a Christmas tree up, shopping done, presents wrapped, and the
Christmas lights up.
Not wanting to kill a tree for the holidays, she went with an artificial Christmas
tree. (A good idea on a planet that’s rapidly being deforested, and wreathed with a
fragile atmosphere that’s heating up with carbon dioxide.) And Zoë had the idea to plant
a tree for Christmas. Twelve trees in fact. One for each day of Christmas. But it was
December and the ground was frozen hard as iron of course, so we made plans to plant
our twelve trees on the first day of May in the following year. Zoë said, that way, when
we finally croak and leave this vale of tears, we’ll leave something behind other than a
buttload of criminals in funny Halloween costumes in the state prisons.
And she just put Christmas lights up indoors, in the house, where we used them as
ambient lighting in lieu of regular lighting for the holidays. On a planet rapidly running
out of fossil fuels, it seemed dumb to illuminate the whole exterior of Locust Manor like
Las Vegas with a lot of unnecessary outdoor lighting. (And, yes, Dear Perceptive Reader,
my whole over-hero secret headquarters stuff including a Cray XMP supercomputer uses
an ungodly amount of juice. But I have my own hydroelectric generator rigged up by
Walter and Kenny to take advantage of one of the waterfalls on my property.)
We took it easy on the gift-buying thing as well. Americans have become more
like mindless consumers than citizens of the Republic. Most of Zoë’s presents were these
wonderful little watercolors she painted for family and friends.
And Zoë made a little Nativity diorama with a variety of unlikely toys – her old
Barbie and My Little Pony dolls, little stuffed penguins and teddy bears, Japanese robots,
an E.T. and an Alien doll, old Tick and Ninja Turtle toys and so on.
And Zoë and I set up a big, soft, king-sized futon on the living room floor in front
of the crackling fireplace hung with stockings and laden with Christmas cards on the
mantle…
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And made love on it…
…By candlelight, the Christmas tree in the background, redolent with the smell of
pine from the pine boughs Zoë brought in and scattered around its base to give it the right
odor, and laden with clinquant tinsel and sparkling plastic icicles and glittering multicolored ornaments; and there were shiny multi-colored presents under the tree in little
white hills of cotton representing snow, and those multi-colored Christmas lights strung
through the house providing soft, ambient lighting, and snow falling on a winter’s night,
past the love seat, out the big, bay windows, with deer coming out of the dark green
forest in the white snow to feed at the winter-feeding station that Zoë had set up for the
animals…
Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra’s Christmas albums played on the CD player
(along with holiday fare from John Lennon and Bruce Springstein and Keith Richards)
and later, in the golden aftergow of love, we drank hot cocoa by the fire.
But, truth-to-tell, I was so thoroughly beaten up (and doped up on drug-fiend
quality pain-killers) that I was in no shape for vigorous lovemaking. I was still
weakened by the flu, and I was taped-up and splinted and bandaged and salved, looking
like Wile E. Coyote after an especially unfortunate encounter with the Roadrunner.
Fortunately, Zoë was sublimely creative in our lovemaking – gentle and athletic,
as she put her rock climbing and gymnastics training to good use…
*
*
*
The New Year arrived, crystalline, sparkling, and white. And cold. With nocturnal windchill factors of 20 below.
Zoë and I missed it.
We left for the South Pacific on the Third Day of Christmas and spent the
holidays and the better part of January in French Polynesia.
We stayed at the Hotel Oa Oa on Point Raititi on Bora Bora. We had one of those
thatch roof Tahitian bungalows built on stilts out over the electric-blue lagoon, reached
by a Dr. Seuss network of walkways and bridges and stairways constructed under the
coconut palms and extending out over the water.
It was tropical paradise.
(Although Zoë claimed it was like trying to sleep in a washing machine, what
with the Pacific ebbing and flowing and sloshing around under your house at night…)
The bungalow had a verandah, with a view of the lagoon and the motus and the
waves crashing out on the horizon on the barrier reef. I wrote most of this account there,
on my laptop, feet propped up on the wooden railing, convalescing, while Zoë was out
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65
windsurfing and snorkeling and scuba diving and painting her watercolors and riding
giant two thousand pound manta rays and whatnot.
At night the Southern Cross sparkled in the sky and the Milky Way blazed like a
great soft band of God’s Own Holy Light over the lagoon and we drank rum drinks with
little pink parasols in them and made love like crazed weasels…
We stayed through most of January.
We returned in the third week of January as the inappropriately named Spring Semester
began back at Riddell. I had to teach a semester of Basic Drawing and Zoë had a full
semester of art classes. It was a wretched time to return. I could have gone for staying
another month or two in the South Pacific. It was enough for me to give some thought to
hanging up my secret identity of a college art professor.
January was it’s usual cold white crystal hell.
And February is the cruelest month…especially so in cruel Upstate New York.
By that time, winter feels like it’s been going on for about three years, the cold is at its
hideous knife blade worst, and there’s no end in sight.
And March. Sweet Jesus in a frozen heaven, March. Garrison Keillor said March
is God’s way of showing people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.
March is gray. The sky is gray. The snow is gray. The trees are gray. The roads
are gray. The slush is gray.
Suicide is never far from one’s mind.
The world looks like a fucking Tim Burton movie: The horrible swirling blackand-gray skies, the black twisted gnarled trees, the strange twisted people bundled in their
weird bulky winter clothes like loathsome mutants hiding their horrible radiation scarred
features from the world, crab-walking down the gray streets through the filthy sepia
slush.
It’s horrible…horrible…
Then there is that weird period…where it becomes warm again, and life is
returning, and the days are nice, and the snow is finally gone and the grass is green, but
all the trees are still spectral and barren of leaves like they’ve all been killed by some
terrible blight from Outer Space…
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Then…magically…miraculously…the buds on the trees begin to blossom in a
green, staggered sequence…and the flowers explode – seemingly overnight – with a
hallucinatory vividness…
Happily, miraculously, spring came early…in April. (Although, the downside here is that
these early springs are almost certainly caused by global warming. And young people
like Zoë are going to be living with Kevin Costner in Waterworld, someday.)
May was fabulous. With beams of golden light descending through the hypergreen of the trees, huge, fluffy, ripped-cotton clouds glowing like opals, backlit with
iridescent sunlight, marching in QuickTime across the sapphirine sky, and the flowers
fulminating like fireworks. The air was fresh and green.
Zoë and I planted our twelve Christmas trees.
And by the last weeks in May, Zoë was finished with her finals, and I was done
with my classes, and we were off for the summer.
Early June is the most magical, wonderful time in Upstate New York. The trees
are like puffy clouds of yellow-green mist, the first cicadas are singing their summer
song, the flowers are a riot of color, the air is full of subtle perfumes, and little bits of
white fluff float everywhere through the golden air like fairies.
I was fully recovered, and Cricket and I were back in our iridescent green summer
uniforms, patrolling the rolling verdant farmlands and small sleepy towns of my beloved
Upstate New York.
And there were great challenges to come. (I’ve always thought of the word
“challenge” as a euphemism for “hideous experience”.) In the early summer we battled
the criminal Armies of the Ant, by deep summer we faced the terrible Cult of the Praying
Mantis, and with the fall came the strange Case of the Control Freak.
But those are tales to be told another time.
*
*
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*
67
In the Grand Scheme of Things, in the Grasshopper & Cricket’s Casebook of Capers, the
Case of the Sinister Snowman was ultimately a minor adventure, a bagatelle, a winter
interlude between the serious cases. Certainly not as problematic as the crimes of the
Connoisseur, or the horror of the Unholy Three, or the madness of the Millipede.
(“It seemed pretty frickin’ serious to me,” Cricket says, upon reading these poor
lines.)
Winter is the off-season in the over-hero racket. Homicidal costumed hypervillains generally favor the warmer months in my experience.
But I suppose the battle with the Snowman and his wretched little elves kept me
out of the pool hall (and Zoë from getting into binge drinking and unsafe sex). Time
better spent than watching television or surfing the web.
And perhaps, in the final analysis, we did a little good, performed a public
service. Not as much as Mahatma Gandhi or Albert Schweitzer or Jonas Salk, but I feel
we did something worthwhile with the gift of our lives.
And perhaps, it it’s own strange way, it was fun…
And what more could you ask for of life than that?
Tujunga, California
Catawissa, Pennsylvania
Ithaca, New York
2002 – 2007