Snow Job Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1977

  Friday, December 9

  Thursday, December 15

  Friday, December 16

  Saturday, December 17

  Sunday, December 18

  Monday, December 19

  Wednesday, December 21

  Saturday, December 24

  Sunday, December 25

  Monday, December 26

  Wednesday, December 28

  Thursday, December 29

  Friday, December 30

  1978

  Monday, January 2

  Tuesday, January 3

  Wednesday, January 4

  Thursday, January 5

  A few days later

  Sample Chapter from COLD CALLS

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  CLARION BOOKS

  3 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2016 by Charles Benoit

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhco.com

  Art by Richard Mia

  Cover illustration © 2016 by Richard Mia

  Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Benoit, Charles.

  Title: Snow job / Charles Benoit.

  Description: Boston ; New York : Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2016]

  Summary: “Nick has created the perfect list of rules for remaking his life. But meeting dark-eyed Dawn, hanging out with teen thug Zod, and making illegal deliveries are nowhere on that list. Small steps lead to an avalanche of consequences as one boy attempts to take charge of his destiny.” —Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015020440 | ISBN 9780544318861 (hardback) Subjects: | CYAC: Conduct of life—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Drug traffic—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / General. | JUVENILE FICTION / Law & Crime. | JUVENILE FICTION / Boys & Men.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B447114 Sn 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015020440

  eISBN 978-0-544-31889-2

  v1.0316

  ROSE:

  WE CAN HITCH A RIDE TO ROCKAWAY BEACH.

  SPECIAL THANKS TO THE RAMONES FOR RESCUING ME. AND TO JOAN JETT FOR SETTING THE BAR SO HIGH.

  —C.B.

  Friday, December 9

  IF IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN—AND IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN—it had to start sometime. That morning looked as good as any other. A day earlier or a day later wouldn’t have made any difference.

  Or so I thought.

  I looked at the list for the ten thousandth time.

  Four lines in my best half-cursive, half-printed scrawl. It wasn’t much, but it took a week to get the wording right, another week figuring out how to work it. And then a month of doing what I did every day, sitting in my room, looking at the list.

  It was all there.

  Solid.

  Simple, really.

  In theory.

  Everything I needed was right there in my room.

  The physical stuff, anyway.

  The mental stuff?

  I put on the shirt I had bought the day before at the Salvation Army store across the street from where I had gotten the haircut. The shirt was red and cost me all of fifty cents, but it fit okay as long as I left the top button undone. I had had shirts like it when I was a kid, but since then it had all been tees and flannels. They’d give me grief about it, I could bet on that. It was different. And different didn’t go over good.

  I added the last touch—another thrift store bargain—then looked at myself in the mirror. I hardly recognized the guy looking back.

  But that was the point, wasn’t it?

  I stuck the list in my wallet, grabbed my coat, and headed to school.

  It was time.

  I SPOTTED THE sub at the door of my fourth period math class and kept walking. With Mr. Tait out, it would be nothing but quiet time and dittoed worksheets, and I wasn’t in the mood for that. I glanced into the room as I went by. A few jocks on probation, the exchange student from Sweden, the usual teacher’s-pet wannabes. Either half the class was sick or they were doing what I was doing, finding someplace better to spend the next forty-seven minutes. There was a rule about not being in the hall without a pass, but in my four years at the school no one had ever asked to see one. There were kids getting high in the parking lot. Nobody was going to worry about a stupid hall pass.

  I rounded the corner and headed to the cafeteria.

  Now if I was really following the list, I’d have gone to an art gallery or a pool hall or down to the lake to watch the waves roll in—any place different from where I usually went. But I was already at school and I didn’t have a car and it was really cold that morning. Other than the library or the smoking lounge, there wasn’t anywhere to go. It was second lunch, and the cafeteria was where the bangers would be. For reasons known only to the office gods, I had third lunch, and that meant I’d been spending a lot less of my day hanging out with the bangers and more time alone. And that meant more time thinking about all the things in my life that needed to change. Like me.

  I walked into the cafeteria and headed for the back of the room.

  Bangerstan.

  Dan-O was suspended and Vicki never came to school on a Friday, but most of the regulars were there, with Tony—empty quart of Mountain Dew bouncing in his hands—doing the talking. As usual. For a moment I was tempted to turn around and go back to class, but old habits die hard. And—I’ll admit it—I wanted a reaction.

  They didn’t disappoint.

  I leaned a chair against the wall and balanced back and waited. It took a second or two for it to sink in, then Tony pointed at me and said, “What the hell you got on?”

  I glanced down at my ensemble, then looked back at Tony. “It’s called a shirt and tie.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. Why you wearing it? You lose a bet?” That made OP laugh, but OP laughed at anything Tony said, so it didn’t count.

  Jay looked up from the science homework he was copying. “He looks like an asshole.”

  “Or a narc,” Tony said. “Nerds don’t even dress like that. What’s the matter, Mommy forget to wash your real clothes?”

  “Check out his stupid sneakers,” OP said, laughing, of course. To make it easy for them, I swung a foot up onto the table, dropping it down with a thud.

  A new pair of white Chuck Taylor All-Stars, colored in, checkerboard style, with a marker.

  A green marker.

  While they stared at the sneaker, I looked around the table. Nothing but flannels and band T-shirts, every guy a slight variation of the last, the Levi’s and work boots as interchangeable as the shaggy haircuts. That made me smile. My journey had begun.

  “You’re an idiot,” Tony said.

  I let the smile roll into a smirk. It was a small gesture, easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. But Tony was, and I knew that my smirk had pissed him off. I swung my foot back down. Mission accomplished.

  But Tony couldn’t let it drop and had to say something. I assumed it would be more about my clothes—they hadn’t even noticed the haircut—but he surprised me and said, “You don’t know shit about football.”

  That wasn’t true.

  I knew how the game was played, I knew the nam
es of the NFL teams or at least the cities they played for, I knew some of the current players and some of the legends, and living where we did in New York State—a thirty-minute bike ride from Lake Ontario and an hour by car from Niagara Falls—I knew enough about the Buffalo Bills to not sound completely ignorant. Tony was wrong, I did know shit about football.

  I just didn’t give a shit about football.

  “Check this out,” Tony said, backhanding the sleeve of the Roach’s smoke-saturated jean jacket. “Nick thinks the Bills are going to beat the Jets this week.”

  The Roach looked at Tony, then at me, then back at Tony. “Bill who?”

  “The Buffalo Bills, dickhead. Nick thinks they’re actually gonna beat the New York Jets.”

  The Roach said nothing but kept his red-rimmed eyes on Tony.

  “It’s football,” Jay said without looking up. “He’s talking about football.”

  “Oh, right,” the Roach said, the two words taking forever to fall out.

  “And Nick here”—Tony pointing at me in case the Roach had forgotten who they were talking about—“thinks the Bills are gonna win.”

  No, I didn’t. It was just something I had said when I was at my locker that morning. Mrs. Grant had been standing by her classroom door, five feet away, picking that morning to be all chatty. Maybe it was the tie. She asked me how my grades were, how I was doing in social studies, asking if I was looking at colleges, me with nothing to say, keeping it to one-word answers. Then she asked who I thought would win that weekend, the Bills or the Jets—as if she could care what I thought—but I didn’t want to be a jerk, so I said I thought the Bills would win. Then she started laughing like it was the stupidest thing she’d heard a kid say in her thirty years as a teacher, shouting across the hall to Mr. Cermak, “Nick thinks the Bills are gonna beat the Jets,” and everybody getting a good laugh at that.

  Here’s the thing: Tony didn’t care about football. None of us bangers did. It was part of being a banger. But Tony wasn’t going to pass up a free shot at me.

  “The Bills are gonna get crushed. The only one who’d be stupid enough to think they had a chance would be some dweeb with his head up his ass and shit for brains.” Now it was Tony’s turn to smirk. “Like Nick.”

  I knew that if I said nothing, Tony would move on, and the random, offhand comment I had said just to say something would be forgotten. But I had my list now, and backing down wasn’t on it. So, despite my not giving a shit, I said, “Wanna bet?”

  Tony looked at me and laughed, then he hit the Roach’s arm again. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Numbnuts here wants to know if I want to bet.”

  The Roach blinked. “Are you still talking about football?”

  “All right,” Tony said, “you’re on.” Then, after a pause, “Twenty bucks.”

  I had two dollars crumpled up in the front pocket of my jeans, a quarter in that little pocket on the right side, and nine dollars at home, most of it in change. I earned a little bit above minimum wage—$2.65 an hour—and worked fourteen hours a week, usually less. It would take my whole paycheck to cover the bet. I didn’t have money to be throwing away like that. But I did have my list, and the list had the answer.

  I paused a second like I was weighing the odds, then I said, “Make it a hundred.”

  Jay looked up from someone else’s paper. “For real?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I could feel my leg start to shake. “Hundred bucks says the Bills beat the Browns this week.”

  “They’re playing the frickin’ Jets, you idiot.”

  Oh. I shrugged. “A hundred bucks.”

  They were all looking at Tony now—Jay, the Roach, Lou, OP, Geralyn, Cici, stray kids at other tables close enough to hear. A hundred bucks? None of them had that kind of money. It was insane. I knew it, and I was sure that Tony knew it too.

  “The bet’s twenty,” Tony said, disappointing everybody but me. “Take it or leave it.”

  So I took it, and that Sunday, the Buffalo Bills beat the New York Jets for their third and final win of the 1977 season.

  Thursday, December 15

  KARLA TWISTED HER LIP AND BLEW THE CIGARETTE SMOKE straight up out of the corner of her mouth. I loved how she looked when she did that, tough, but considerate enough not to blow the smoke in your face. It made her look as old as her fake ID said she was. We were sitting on the back bumper of somebody’s pickup truck behind the Pizza Hut where Karla waited tables. It was sunny and warm for mid-December, weeks since the last decent snowstorm, but there was still too much snow piled up to sit on the guardrail, our usual spot. And to get this straight right from the start, we weren’t going out and we’d never fooled around, not even a little. We’d joke about it, each of us trying to out-crude the other, but that’s as far as it ever went, which is good, since it would have just screwed it up.

  “Tony pay you?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Think he will?”

  “No. He’s hoping I forget.”

  “Will you?”

  “Probably.”

  “He’d make you pay if he won,” she said.

  “That’s him.”

  She took a long drag on her Newport. “That bet thing? That wasn’t because of your list, was it?”

  It was, but I didn’t admit it.

  “And the scalp job?” She smiled and ran a finger over the top of my ear, the first time since sixth grade that it hadn’t been hidden under my hair. It wasn’t a brush cut or anything, but it was short. Most of the teachers had longer hair. “That part of it too?”

  Right again, but I said, “Maybe.”

  “It’s cute. But a list isn’t going to change who you are. Life doesn’t work like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t. It’s not that simple.”

  I watched the smoke curl off the end of the cigarette and thought about my list. Four lines, eight words total. Seemed pretty simple to me. And so far it was working. People were talking about the bet. Girls I didn’t know said they liked my haircut. I was still wearing the tie. Small stuff, yeah, but a start.

  Another drag. “I can see shutting up Tony, that makes sense. But a hundred bucks on a football game?”

  “Easy come, easy go,” I said, like I had bags of cash under my bed.

  She looked at me, then did that thing again with her lip and blew. “You’re not that stupid.”

  “You’d be surprised at how stupid I can be.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  The back door of the Pizza Hut popped open. A guy in his twenties—mustache, red and white checkered shirt, clipboard—looked over at Karla. He made a production about staring at his watch, pushing the tiny button on the side, making sure we could see that it wasn’t just some old-fashioned timepiece with hands but a shiny new Texas Instruments digital watch. He held the man-from-the-future pose way too long, then pulled the door closed.

  “That was hardly fifteen minutes,” Karla said, flicking the butt into a dirty snowbank as she stood. “Apparently all the regulars are at Jay’s tomorrow. You gonna go?”

  Hanging out at Jay’s house was one of the reasons I’d made a list. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “You got something else to do?”

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s no way I’m gonna spend another Friday night sitting around listening to the same scratchy side of the same Zeppelin album. Just meet me there. We’ll figure something out.”

  I was looking forward to not going to Jay’s at all, but it was Karla, so I’d be there. In a way, that was on the list too.

  I stood up and brushed the road salt off my jeans. Giving up rock-star tees for a shirt and tie was one thing, but there was no way I was switching from jeans. I was walking her to the back door of the Pizza Hut when she said, all casual, “I heard Zod was asking about you today.”

  I stopped and, for a few beats, so did my heart. I put my hands in my pockets a
nd looked past Karla, out through the parking lot, over the main road, and all the way back to middle school.

  “It was years ago,” Karla said. “Maybe he’s over it.”

  I smiled at that.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said.

  “You’re probably right,” I said, knowing she was wrong.

  Karla kicked the toe of her boot twice against the back door, and a busboy younger than me opened it. She ignored the kid’s dopey smile, and before she went in, she looked at me. She started to say something, stumbled on the first word, turned, and went inside, pulling the steel door shut behind her.

  Friday, December 16

  THE STOP-N-GO WAS IN A PLAZA AT AN INTERSECTION A mile from my school. There was a narrow liquor store on one side of the Stop-N-Go, a dry cleaner on the other, and, next to that, a tiny office for an insurance agent. A tall wooden fence separated the twenty-car parking lot from the suburban houses in the neighborhood. Across the street was a funeral home, and there were competing gas stations on the other two corners.

  Back when I was in middle school, cars would be lined up out into the street, waiting to buy gas, the price going up every day and “Out of Gas” signs posted every week. That was 1973. Now both stations sold gas for sixty cents, and there was never a line. The Roach used to pump gas at one of them, Vicki’s cousin got a year’s probation for stealing tires from the other.

  I didn’t mean to get a job at the Stop-N-Go—it just sorta happened. I had gone in for an application, part of a careers assignment in health class last year, and the next thing the store manager’s asking if I can start on Saturday. So I stocked shelves and loaded the cooler and swept the parking lot and rang up customers—everything the manager didn’t want to do, and all for $2.65 an hour. The job earned me some spending money, but it brought an end to my whopping five-dollars-a-week allowance.

  Friday night at seven, I was at the register, the easiest job in the place.

  Jay came in, looked around. “He here?”