J e r r y s p I n e L l I

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26 . What a Kid Is 
“Claudia . . .” 
He sends his whisper out ahead of him. His 
whisper is his eyes, his fingertips. 
“Claudia . . .” 
He does not know it is snowing unless he 
turns his face up. 
The snowplow doesn’t come here. 
He trips over something, sprawls facedown 
into snow. He gets up, wipes his face. There’s 
snow on his neck, melting under his collar. He 
takes his hands from his coat pockets, for bal-
ance, the better not to fall. 
And falls again. 
He pulls out his lucky stone. He clutches it in 
his hand. His hands are wet and cold. 
“Claudia . . .” 
Dim light ahead: the next street. The snowfall 
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reappears. He crosses the street and back into 
alleyway blackness. 
“Claudia . . .” 
He crosses another street, and another. In 
time he hears the staticky squawk of a two-way 
radio. To his right there is light through an air-
shaft, glow silhouettes the rooftops. Voices. He is 
behind Claudia’s house. He thinks to call out: 
“You’re looking in the wrong place!” But he only 
trudges on, leaving the lights and the voices 
behind, sinking into the blackness. 
“Claudia . . .” 
He squeezes his lucky stone. He puts his 
hands in his pockets. His pockets feel the same as 
his hands, cold and wet. How did that happen? 
Squares of light to the left and right show 
the presence of kitchen and back bedroom win-
dows. But they hold their light, it does not reach 
the alley. It is flat, like yellow paper pasted on 
black. 
He stumbles in hidden potholes, lurches 
against open gates and chain-link fences and who 
knows what all in the cold pillowy night. 
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He trudges on. He no longer bothers to lift 
his feet. 
“Claudia . . .” 
How long can she last? How long can a little 
girl stay warm, stay alive in a snowstorm at night? 
He will find her. 
How will he find her? 
Will she be crouched and shivering, some-
thing he stumbles over? 
Will he hear her first, hear her little girl voice 
laughing and saying, “I runned away! I runned 
away!” 
What will he say when he finds her? He 
thinks. He thinks. He will say “Aha!” That’s all 
he can think of. 
Will she want to have a snowball fight before 
they go home? Will he say, “Don’t be silly”? Will 
she insist? 
He thinks of Polly, his sister. Polly was once 
as little as Claudia. Polly used to run away too. 
“Gets it from Donald,” his mother used to say. 
But that wasn’t true. Donald didn’t run away. He 
left the house. There’s a difference. Polly ran away. 
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When Polly got a notion, it was “Katie, bar the 
door,” as his mother used to say. Maybe she should 
have said, “Katie, get the leash.” But there was no 
leash and no harness, and if the door wasn’t barred, 
it was Polly down the steps and up the street. 
Whoever was closest, that was your job: Get 
Polly. His father used to say, “Some day I’m 
going to call her bluff. I’m going to let her walk 
as far as she wants.” Uncle Stanley said, “I bet 
she’ll walk all the way to Cleveland.” 
And one day darn if his father didn’t do it, 
called her bluff, let her go. He stayed right 
behind her, Donald behind him. When she came 
to the street she just waltzed on across it, no stop, 
look and listen for her, his father like a mother 
duck, watching for cars. When she realized he 
was behind her, she squealed and ran faster, her 
little rear end bouncing like a pair of apples. 
She didn’t make it all the way to Cleveland, 
but she did make it to Ludlow Avenue, which his 
father bragged for the next several years was at 
least a mile from where she started. But in the 
end she stopped. Funny thing, she never slowed 
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down, she just stopped, in the middle of the 
street. She stopped and turned and looked at him 
and his father and just plopped her apples right 
down on the street, one car coming to a stop, 
another swinging around them. 
She had been utterly pleased with herself. “I 
runned away!” she chirped, and the sun was no 
match for her smile. And Zinkoff saw in that 
moment something that he had no words for. He 
saw that a kid runs to be found and jumps to be 
caught. That’s what being a kid is: found, caught. 
Then she did something that has never left him. 
Sitting there in the middle of the street, she 
reached up to him, not to his father but to him, 
and his heart went out of him and he picked her 
up and he carried her home on his shoulders. 
“Claudia . . .” 
She isn’t running anymore. He knows that 
now. She is waiting. 
The lucky stone—he cannot feel it. Did he 
drop it? He panics. When he comes to the next 
street light, he looks. The stone is still there, in 
his hand. His hands have become like the stone, 
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cold and hard and unfeeling. He lifts the stone 
and runs its smooth, icy surface along his cheek. 
He runs it along his lips. He puts it in his mouth, 
the only warm part of him left. 
Back into the blackness. 
“Claudia . . .”