From the Indie Side Read online

  Gendry had enclosed a check for ten dollars, which Froestt never cashed. The story was published in the magazine’s September issue. It had been heavily edited by Gendry himself.

  The story was about a military sniper named John Frost. (“Clever disguise,” Gendry wrote.) In the tale, Frost is sent into the dusky hills high above a German village with his spotter, a soldier named Jankel. Frost and Jankel find a cliff dense with foliage. There’s a clear line of sight to the village church, a narrow building with a tall bell tower that overlooks a plaza. Frost burrows into the bushes, and Jankel climbs a tree to serve as lookout.

  They’ve been assigned to take down a German general. For days they watch the church. Intelligence suggests that the general and his men are holed up deep inside the structure, perhaps in a subbasement. Frost doesn’t know what the general has done, and he doesn’t ask.

  Days pass, and nobody emerges from the church. Frost and Jankel take shifts on the cliff’s edge, sip water from their canteens, and munch ration bars, and otherwise speak very little. On the fourth day, Jankel’s shift at the scope ends.

  “I don’t think they’re here,” he grumbles to Frost, who scoots into place with the rifle.

  “You know our orders,” Frost says. “We wait.”

  And so they wait. But they are tired, and Jankel falls asleep in the tree. Frost concentrates on the church, employing his sniper’s training to slow his heart rate, his breathing, to dim the world around him. He does not hear Jankel’s light snores. He doesn’t feel the rain that has begun to fall. He doesn’t feel the tiny hunger pangs in his belly. For him, there is only the church, and nothing else in the entire world.

  When Jankel awakes, Frost lies still in the bushes. Hours pass before Jankel realizes that Frost hasn’t stirred, even a little, for some time. He hisses at Frost, who doesn’t answer. He climbs out of the tree and crawls to Frost’s position, and grabs his partner by the ankle.

  Frost’s boot is freezing cold, to Jankel’s surprise. He grips both of Frost’s feet and yanks him, inch by inch, out of the bushes. Jankel discovers, to his horror, that Frost is frozen solid. The rifle is locked in his blue fingers.

  In the story, this is an unusual development because it is not winter. The story takes place in the peak of summer, when it is hot enough in the German countryside that both soldiers sweat while sitting still in the shade.

  In Froestt’s original draft of “The Forgotten Winter Lands,” Jankel abandons Frost on the hillside and returns to base. Gendry, whose brother had served in the war, found this unrealistic, and modified the story. In the published story, Jankel drags Frost back to base, dodging German patrols and moving by night. It takes two days—two days of hauling a heavy, icy corpse across sweltering hills—but Jankel succeeds. Frost is declared dead by a field doctor—who in both drafts seems rather unsurprised to find that Frost has become an icicle—and his body is parked on a gurney in the morgue tent while it waits for extraction with other casualties.

  But Frost thaws out, and when he does, he reanimates, startling a nurse and raving about a beautiful white snowbound world where men can be gods. “You have to let me go back!” he yells at the medical staff. “They need me there!”

  He is quarantined and interviewed by several army doctors, and tells each the same story in almost identical words: he quieted his body, as any good sniper does, and eventually fell into a sort of fugue. The world blurred out around him, and then so did the world he saw through the scope. He felt calm and relaxed, and then, in his mind’s eye, he saw a red door. It opened, and he went through it, and when he emerged on the other side, he was in a white world of ice and snow and sun. He called it the land of winter, the doctors reported, and described sparkling ice castles that were no taller than his belly. These structures were inhabited by very small, very human-like beings that Frost called the Snowlings.

  “Patient reports that these Snowling creatures received him as a god, and petitioned him for help,” one doctor reported. “Patient is clearly delusional, and I recommend a medical discharge for psychiatric reasons.”

  In the story, Frost is indeed discharged. He returns to America, where his family is disillusioned by his strange rants about the winter lands. Frost’s wife takes the children and leaves him. He is unable to hold a job, and eventually, as he grows old, his eldest child returns and puts him in a retirement home with medical supervision. To his death, Frost talks of almost nothing except for winter and the Snowlings. He hammers at a typewriter, producing page after page of complete drivel—rambling passages about quests and kingships and storms and gods and ice. He is found dead in his room one morning, his lips blue, skin pale and drained of color. His body radiates cold.

  The story ends rather abruptly. Frost dies, and when he opens his eyes again, he stands in the winter land, surrounded by the Snowlings, revered and welcomed into their tiny arms. The story is a curiosity at best, readers seemed to think, and only a few letters to Gendry mentioned it. None celebrated it; one reader described it as “neither fantastic nor wonderful, but interesting.”

  It was the only story of Froestt’s that Gendry would publish, though he received a plain yellow envelope in the mail, once per week, for the rest of his life. When Gendry died in 1974, the envelopes were marked “Addressee Deceased” and returned to Froestt, who never submitted another story to any publication ever again.

  * * *

  The old man wakes up with a start. He looks to his right. His water cup is gone, replaced with a human being. All of the chairs around him are occupied now, and he struggles to sit up, aware that he has slumped a little toward his neighbor during his unexpected nap.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers loudly into the person’s shoulder.

  The room feels almost full, and the old man suddenly feels very out of place. He doesn’t belong here, really. He is not an accomplished writer, only a persistent one. The small apartment he occupies in the retirement community is mostly unfurnished, except for a twin bed and a lonely chair and end table. The rest of the room is stacked with cartons. They are ancient and so stuffed with paper that their squared-off sides bulge, their flat bottoms sag. At some point over the years he ran out of cartons, and could no longer find the model that he preferred, so he simply began stacking loose paper on top of the boxes. Towers of typing paper clutter the apartment. He has filled the cabinets in his kitchenette with pages. The icebox contains reams of them. His dish rack has never seen a dish, but holds several hundred loose sheets of paper that fold and curl over each other.

  He has written of the winter lands for more than sixty years. His writing has not improved with practice. It employs a passive voice, and is richly populated with fragments of sentences, and he has never learned the difference between an adjective and an adverb. He frequently shifts from a first-person perspective to a third, and sometimes misspells his hero’s name, using Frost and Froestt interchangeably.

  A woman writer stands at the dais now, reading from a short story that is, so far as Froestt can tell, about a bastard who gets his in the end. She reads nervously, but with a certain shaky confidence, and at her last line—“He sits up, looks around, and never sees the car that lops his head off like a cantaloupe”—there is a polite smattering of applause.

  Froestt can only see the woman’s legs as she walks away, and the legs of the man who steps up to the dais next. His pants are well pressed, his shoes shiny brown leather. His voice is reedy and he says, “We’ve got a few minutes before Heidi Johannsson arrives, time for one last reader. Any volunteers?”

  Several hands go up—the old man can hear the rustle of sleeves and pages—and he lifts his cane into the air and waves it around.

  The man at the dais hesitates, and then the old man sees a familiar pair of legs approach the dais—the girl who brought him water and helped him to his seat. He lowers his cane, certain that she will intervene for him, and she does.

  “The gentleman with the cane,” the fellow at the dais says, and then the wo
man appears at Froestt’s side to help him up. She walks with him to the dais. His feet squelch in his shoes, his socks damp with sweat. She notices, and with kindness asks if he will be all right. He nods and whispers a rattly thanks.

  Froestt is small and hunched at the dais, and cannot crane his neck enough to see the man who has welcomed him there.

  “What’s your name, sir?” the man asks.

  “Jonathan,” Froestt says.

  “Jonathan,” the man repeats. “And your story? What will you be reading to us today?”

  He tips the microphone down. Froestt clears his throat and says, “I’ll be reading from my novel.”

  “What’s your novel called?”

  “The Forgotten Winter Lands,” he says.

  “Catchy title,” the man says. “I assume you’ve been sending it to publishers?”

  Froestt can feel the crowd’s alternating curiosity and disinterest in his story. Sweat dribbles down his nose. He shakes his head and says, “No publishers. It’s not finished yet.”

  “Well, I wish I could say that I hope we’ll see it on our shelves one day,” the man says. “But I wish you luck in your writing, and let’s all give Jonathan a round of applause for joining us today.”

  The soft patter of hands fades quickly. The woman from before steps up and helps to adjust the microphone to Froestt’s height. She covers it with her hand and says, “You’re sure you’re okay? I can’t take your coat? You seem awfully warm.”

  “Thank you,” Froestt says again. The microphone squeals a tiny bit.

  He cannot see the audience, but he can feel their stares. The thin trickle of sweat down his ribs is now a steady stream. It soaks into his clothing, and then his coat.

  Someone whispers, “The poor man is going to have heatstroke in that coat.”

  The coat quickly soaks through and turns almost black with moisture.

  “The Forgotten Winter Lands,” Froestt reads, his voice like a crumbling wall. “Chapter One.”

  A puddle collects at his feet. Moisture drips from his nose, from the soaking flaps of his hat. His glasses fog with condensation, so he removes them, and holds his pages closer to his face. The paper becomes soggy in his hands, and the ink of his words begins to run, but it is no matter, for he knows the words by heart after all these years.

  He puts the paper down on the dais. By now the audience is chattering audibly about the poor man and his condition. Someone says, loudly, “Give the man some water,” and another person says, “That’s unnatural. Someone should call an ambulance.” Froestt hears the words overheated and pass out, but he ignores them, and narrates his story aloud.

  “John Frost was a sniper of the highest order,” he says. “He is known for taking all of his shots and not missing one. Never even the hardest of them.”

  Someone groans softly.

  “His friend is Martin Jankel, and they have been friends since the beginning,” Froestt continues, closing his eyes. He feels his breathing even out, and the words soothe him. His heart, pounding so hard moments before, calms to a patient thump-thump, and each pattern of beats further from the beats before. “Jankel is the spotter in their sniper team, and Frost is the sniper, and they are both quite good. Together and apart, but mostly together.”

  Froestt’s clothing grows saturated with water. It drips from his sleeves, from his dangling hands, from his chin and nose and brow. The puddle around his feet spreads. It leaps and dances with each falling drop from above.

  “I have to ask you to stop,” says the host, who steps delicately through the widening pool of water and puts a hand over the microphone. “Sir, are you—what is going on? Are you all right?”

  “You look terrible,” says the girl. “Come, sit down while we call an ambulance.”

  Froestt shakes his head. “I’m quite all right,” he says. “Call an ambulance if you must, but please, let me read until they arrive.”

  “Sir,” the man protests.

  Froestt leans back as far as he can, until he can just glimpse the man’s eyes.

  “Please,” Froestt says. “I’ve truly waited a lifetime for this.”

  The man looks at the girl, then back at Froestt. Then he raises both of his hands, palms out, as if to say All right, it’s not my problem—I tried. He backs away, then says, loudly, “Let’s continue.”

  Froestt nods and turns back to the microphone.

  “On the day that it all happened, Frost and Jankel were sent to the hills beyond an enemy post,” he reads. “Their task was to assassinate a very evil general. He was the most evil general there was, at least at that moment of the war. This was World War Two.”

  Another groan from the audience.

  Froestt’s eyes close as he imagines the words. Sixty years of words—millions of them, stacked carefully in his apartment, unread, unpublished. He is old, he is tired, and he supposes he intends to read here until his novel is finished. He will ad-lib the ending if he must, but the ending cannot be told until—until he knows what it is.

  The ambulance arrives at the front of the shop, its turning lights washing the gallery and the shelves in blue and red. Two uniformed men enter, carrying a collapsed stretcher between them.

  Froestt doesn’t look up, but the host approaches him again. “Okay, sir,” he says. “They’ve arrived. Why don’t you come with me—”

  “My ending,” Froestt says. “Is this it?”

  The man says, “Yes, sir, it’s time for you to go.”

  He puts his hand on the dais and reaches for Froestt’s arm. Froestt recoils, just a bit, and leans on his cane heavily. The twisted wood makes a cracking sound that reverberates through the shop, and someone gasps, and then the cane shatters like ice. Brown and black shards explode outward like little frozen chips, and Froestt’s eyes widen, and he stumbles backward, away from the host.

  “Whoa, there—” the host says, and in that moment four people dash toward the dais: the host, the woman who had brought Froestt his water, and the two emergency personnel who have only just arrived, and who drop their stretcher as they run for the old man.

  The girl is somehow quicker than them all, and gets one hand behind Froestt as he tumbles, and she feels his heavy wet wool coat go slack as he falls, and then she hears someone scream, and Froestt crumbles into a shining wet pile of clothing and snow, and the gallery falls utterly silent.

  * * *

  The rest of the program is rescheduled for the following day, and the host dismisses all of the guests from the store, and locks the doors. He returns to the dais, which has been moved aside, and watches as the ambulance technicians shuffle around, unsure what to do.

  “Lucy,” the host says to the girl, who still rests on her knees beside the melting heap of bluish snow.

  She looks up at him. “He was real,” she says, dazed. “I touched him.”

  “I think you should let these men talk to you,” he says, nodding at the medical team.

  “He was real,” she repeats.

  The men take her out of the store to the ambulance to check her over. When they’ve left, the host walks over to the damp pile of snow and old clothes and kicks at them with his toe. The old man is gone, as if he had never been there. The snow fades quickly under the shop lights, turning to water and running away in rivulets across the wood floor.

  “Huh,” he says.

  There’s little else to say.

  He bends over and grabs the collar of the old man’s coat and picks it up, shaking out clumps of snow. The collar has a label, and on the label the words J. Froestt are written in black marker. The words are smeary and damp, the ink bleeding deep into the label’s threads.

  The host folds the coat at the shoulders and lays it over the dais, then sighs and goes to the back of the store and into a closet, and comes back holding a mop, and gets to work.

  A Word From Jason Gurley

  Short stories have an advantage over the novel, I think. In a novel, readers expect answers. They demand closure. But in a short
story, there are no such expectations. Ambiguity is not anathema to the short story, and so when I write the odd short story now and then, I find myself stepping away from the microphone just before the final note plays. “The Winter Lands” is no different. Who are the Snowlings? What do they want from John Frost? Was Jonathan Froestt’s perpetual novel-in-progress not a novel at all, but a work of nonfiction?

  Having spent over thirteen years writing a book called Eleanor, I know a little something about novels that never seem to end. I’m attracted to the idea of writers who fall so deeply into their stories that they can’t seem to find their way out again. Jonathan Froestt may have taken that habit to greater extremes than others I’ve known.

  But Eleanor will be published in 2014, and I’ve written a few novels that aren’t too difficult to find. In addition to being invited to contribute to this anthology, I also designed its cover, something I do quite a lot of these days. More of both—my books and my cover design work—can be found at my web site (http://www.jasongurley.com).

  Many thanks to David Gatewood, Brian Spangler and Susan May for inviting me to be a part of this fine collection of stories. I’m honored, and humbled to share these pages with such amazing independent authors.

  “Emily… I need you to wake up.”

  A stir.

  “Come on now!” a voice cracked.

  The warm touch of someone’s hand.

  “Huh?” she muttered.

  Someone nudged her, squeezing her shoulder until she moved.

  “What?” Groggy and disoriented.

  “Emily! Girl, it’s an emergency!”

  Reluctantly, her eyes swam dully in a sliver of fuzzy dim light. She found the outline of a familiar figure standing over her.

  “Mom?”

  “Come on, Emily. You have to get up. We have to go, now!”