Cynthia Felice - Track of a legend

look like?”

“My mother.”

Timothy’s mother was regular looking; so whatever a complex was, it had nothing to do with getting ugly. The Johnsons weren’t ugly either, but they went through what my dad called phases, which he said was all in their heads. Maybe Timothy’s aunt’s complex was like Lester Johnson’s Linda phase, but that didn’t seem right because Lester-Linda came outside all the time and Timothy’s aunt never did.

“What does she do inside all the time?”

“Works.”

I nodded, considerably wiser. The old public buildings were down in the woods with the school, mostly monuments to waste of space ever since we got our mux cable that fed into every building in the community. Most of the grown-ups stopped going to work, and they stopped coming to school on voting day, but we still had to go, and not just on voting day.

“Come on,” Timothy said.

But the smoke fascinated me. It puffed out of a silver pipe and skittered down the side of the house as if the fluffy falling snow was pushing it down. It smelled strange. I formed a snowball, a good solid one, took aim at the silver pipe, and let it fly.

“Missed by at least a kilometer,” Timothy said, scowling.

Undaunted I tried another, missed the pipe, but struck the house, which resounded with a metallic thud. I’d closed one of the house’s eyes with a white patch of snow. Timothy grinned at me, his mind tracking with mine. She’d have to come out to get the snow off the sensors. Soon we had pasted a wavy line of white spots about midway up the silver wall.

“One more on the right,” commanded Timothy. But he stopped midswing when we heard a loud whirring noise. Around the hill came a grass cutter, furiously churning snow with its blades.

“Retreat!” shouted Attila the Hun. Timothy grabbed the frozen cardboard sled.

We leaped aboard and the elephant sank to its knees. I didn’t need Timothy to tell me to run.

At the fence we threw ourselves over the frozen pickets, miraculously not getting our clothes hung up in the wires. The grass cutter whirred along the fenced perimeter, frustrated, thank goodness, by the limits of its oxide-on-sand mind.

“Ever seen what, one of those things does to a rabbit?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Cuts them up into bits of fur and guts,” Timothy said solemnly.

“Your aunt’s weird,” I said, grateful to be on the right side of the fence.

“Uh oh. You lost a glove,” Timothy said.

I nodded unhappily and turned to look over at the wrong side of the fence. Shreds of felt and wire and red nylon lay in the grass cutter’s swath.

We walked on, feeling like two dejected warriors in the Alpine woods without our elephant and minus one almost-new battery-operated glove until we spied Bigfoot’s tracks in the snow — big, round splots leading up the side of the wash. Heartened by our discovery, we armed ourselves properly with snowballs and told each other this was the genuine article.

The snowfall was heavier now, really Bigfoot weather, and we knew how much Bigfoot liked storms, or we’d find tracks all the time.

We followed the footprints all the way to the Wigginses’ house, only to find little Bobby Wiggles in them, hand-me-down boots overheating and making great puddles with each step.

Bobby stood looked at us, cheeks flushed from heat or stinging wind.

Then he or she — I couldn’t tell if Bobby Wiggles was a boy or a girl — giggled and went running into the house.

Timothy and I stayed out in the snow searching for Bigfoot tracks but found only rabbit tracks, which we followed in hopes that Bigfoot might do likewise, since aside from children there was nothing else for it to eat in our neighborhood, and no children had ever been reported eaten. Bigfoot may not have been hungry, but we had had only a few gingerbread cookies since noon; so when the rabbit tracks zagged near my house, we didn’t turn again. We forgot the rabbit and Bigfoot and walked the rest of the way through the ghost-white woods to my front door, where we kicked off our boots and threw down our jackets and gloves. Mom and Dad were in the media room in front of the kitchen monitor, checking the Christmas menu.

“Go back and plug your gloves into the recharger,” Dad said without glancing up.

But Mom must have looked up because she said right away, “Both of them.”

“I lost one,” I said.

“Go back and find it.”

Timothy and I looked at each other.

Mom was still watching me. “It won’t do any good,” I said finally. “We were up on the hill, and Timothy’s aunt sicced the grass cutter on us.”

“Why would she do a thing like that?”

Timothy and I shrugged.

“Well, I’ll call her and ask her to let you get your glove,” Dad said, rolling his chair to the comm console.

“The grass cutter got it,” I said, more willing to face punishment for losing a glove than what might happen if Dad found out the day before Christmas that we’d closed her house’s eyes.

“I told you she was getting crazier by the minute,” Dad said.

“She isn’t dangerous.”

“How do you know that? The grass cutter, of all things.”

“She has too much dread to be deliberately mean. I don’t doubt for a second that she knew a couple of kids could outrun the grass cutter, and what else could she do? Go outside and ask them to go away?” Mom shook her head. “Her heart would stop from the anxiety of leaving her little sanctuary.”

“She left the clinic fast enough when it caught on fire, and when she first came back that was as much her sanctuary as her spaceship house is now.”

“You can’t expect her to have enough energy to treat every minor day-to-day incident like an emergency.”

“I think she should go back where she came from.”

“Hush, dear. We voted for the treaty.”

“They ought to have sent them to L-5.”

“Couldn’t, and you know—”

Timothy and I left them talking about his aunt, but I knew I’d probably not heard the end of the glove. That was the problem with sexagenarian parents; they knew all the tricks from the first set of kids, and they had very good memories.

In the kitchen we had hot chocolate, slopping some on the puzzle my big sister had broken back into a thousand pieces before she gave it to me.

“What are you getting for Christmas?” Timothy asked me, his cheeks still pink from being outdoors and his eyes as bright as tinsel fluttering in the warm convection currents of the house.

I shrugged. My parents were firm about keeping the Christmas list up-to-date, and that started every year on December twenty-sixth. I still wanted the fighting kite I’d keyed into the list last March, and the bicycle sail and the knife and the Adventure Station with vitalized figures and voice control. I also wanted the two hundred and eighty other items on my list and knew I’d be lucky if ten were under the tree tomorrow morning and that some of them would be clothes, which I never asked for but always received. “An Adventure Station,” I finally said, more hopeful than certain. It was the one thing I’d talked about a lot, but Dad kept saying it was too much like the Hovercraft Depot set I’d gotten last year.

“Me too,” Timothy said, “and a sled. Which should we play with first?”

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