The Last Chairlift

40. THE NIGHT OF THE SANTAS

There’d been another marine in the making in the Exeter wrestling room when I was wrestling there. Sam was our starter at 121 pounds, the year before I graduated. Everyone liked him. Sam was practically a marine before he came to Exeter; he’d been born on the Marine Corps base in Quantico. He went from Exeter to the U.S. Naval Academy and he did two tours of duty in Vietnam. We had our differences over the war, but we’d been good friends at Exeter and we remained good friends. A decorated hero, Sam was awarded the Silver Star, for valor in combat, and a Purple Heart—the one you get if you’re wounded. He had a Bronze Star Medal, too; I forget what that one is for.

Sam and I weren’t workout partners when we were teammates in the Exeter wrestling room; we were the wrong size to wrestle each other. Sam was a little guy. Elliot Barlow had been Sam’s principal workout partner at Exeter. The Marine Corps would promote Sam to brigadier general in 1989, and to major general and lieutenant general in 1992. Sam would be promoted to general in 1995, the same year he became commandant of the Marine Corps. In my opinion, and in Mr. Barlow’s, Sam was always very determined—both a positive guy and a fair-minded one. Sam was a far cry from the backup heavyweight without a name, the one we called our marine.

The natural 190-pounder was a prick of misery in comparison to “the general,” as the snowshoer and I called Sam. “The good marine,” we also called Sam, to distinguish him from the undersize heavyweight who was “the bad marine”—our other name for our marine, whose actual name was one that no one could remember in the monosyllabic utterances of life in boarding schools.

“Too many syllables to keep in mind. A New York mercantile family—originally, an English name,” the little English teacher told me. She’d found a photo of the saturnine boy who was too big to make weight at 177 pounds, but too small to be a starting heavyweight. Elliot Barlow had her own collection of Exeter yearbooks, from every year she’d been a teacher and a coach at the academy. She found the unsmiling Emory Trowbridge in the back row, in the photo of the JV wrestling team. Gloom appeared to be Emory’s constant companion. Was a perpetual pessimism characteristic of the Trowbridge family, perhaps inherent in all Trowbridges, or was Emory’s gloominess entirely his own?

“Our marine hasn’t changed much, has he?” the pretty Mr. Barlow asked me, when we looked at the small heavyweight in the JV wrestling team photo. Emory Trowbridge’s hatred had been restrained even then, even as a teenager. No wonder no one could remember him. Emory Trowbridge hadn’t done anything; maybe, as a teenager, he’d also refrained from saying what he thought. The snowshoer and I knew that our marine had overcome his youthful reticence to express himself. We could only guess that being in the Marine Corps had given him more confidence; maybe the experience had shaped, or had hardened, his political views. He’d told us (bitterly, but without anger) the Marine Corps was his home. Yet in his sullen standoffishness, even in the JV wrestling team photo, our backup heavyweight didn’t look like a team player. To Elliot and me, our marine had behaved like a born loner.

“Tell me how a loner is likely to fare in the Marine Corps. We should ask the general about our marine,” the snowshoer had said. But we let it go, or we were too busy—or we didn’t want to bother Sam. The general, we knew, was busier than we were, and we weren’t imagining we would see our marine again.

Mr. Barlow was busier as a copy editor than she’d ever been; she was also the sole trustee of her late parents’ estate, not only their real estate but the little Barlows’ literary holdings. It was in the realm of the little English teacher’s expertise to choose a biographer for the departed writing team, but Elliot was over her head as a landlord. For now, she’d been advised, it was more profitable for her to rent the little Barlows’ ski chalet in St. Anton and their pied-à-terre in Vienna than it would be to sell them. On the other hand, the snowshoer said, she was told she should sell the apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street, but she didn’t. Notwithstanding her conviction that she would never be a real New Yorker, the pretty Mr. Barlow said she was too busy to think about moving somewhere else.

My mother and Molly wanted the snowshoer to move to Manchester, but Nora and Em (and Elliot herself) had made fun of me for moving to Manchester. “I guess you’re really serious about writing all the time, kiddo, because I don’t know what else you’re going to do in Vermont,” Nora said.

Em wrote me that my moving to Vermont amounted to my “consenting to an arranged marriage”; Em was kidding, but not entirely. Everyone knew I’d agreed to meet Grace, and that Grace was my mom’s idea. I still hadn’t met Grace, but my meeting her was as much in the offing as my going skiing with my mother. And everyone knew I’d stopped seeing Wilson, which had also been my mom’s idea—not that anyone really liked Wilson. “Not even Wilson liked Wilson, but you know your mother is setting you up to fall in love with Grace—and you know I love your mom,” Em wrote me.

The snowshoer, ever a good stepfather, teased me a little. “I said you should ski with your mother, not move in with her. You’re almost fifty, Adam, a little old to live with your mom,” the snowshoer said. She was just teasing me; Elliot knew I was looking for a place of my own in Vermont. I was staying with my mother and Molly until something turned up. There were some brand-new houses for sale in Manchester—large, empty houses that had been built on spec. I’d thought about renting one of the spec houses that hadn’t been sold, but the Realtor forewarned me they would still be showing the house to prospective buyers, and it was an unfurnished house. I had no furniture, befitting a vagabond.

“Molly and I will get you what you need for furniture, sweetie. When you buy some land and build your own house, the furniture that we get for you can go in your own house,” my mother said. That was when I realized my mom was imagining my moving to Vermont for the long haul; she’d already been looking at land for sale. Molly was no pantomimist. Em would have been clearer, but the look Molly gave me was clear enough: my mom didn’t tell Molly everything she was up to. “I saw an uphill piece of land, off Dorset Hill Road. If you cut down some trees, sweetie, you could see the top of Bromley from there,” my mom said. I wondered how uphill she meant, and why seeing the top of Bromley Mountain would necessarily be of interest to me. “So you can see how hard the wind is blowing, sweetie. Then you’ll know how to dress, for skiing,” my mother told me. As for the uphill part about the land for sale: “You should have all-wheel drive if you’re going to live anywhere in Vermont, sweetie.”

Molly tried to say I should wait and see if I was going to like skiing—that is, before I bought a piece of land with a view of Bromley Mountain. “As I recall, Ray, Adam didn’t much care for skiing the last time he tried it,” the ski patroller said.

“Don’t be a know-it-all, Molly,” my mom said. She had the highest expectations for my moving to Vermont, a little like her expectations for my meeting Grace.

“Ray, let Adam meet Grace—let them decide if they want to go out,” the trail groomer had told my mother, who was buying me ski clothes before it started to snow. “Your mom is not one to doubt herself, Kid,” Molly reminded me.

“It’s kind of bad timing, sweetie—that you’re leaving New York and moving here, when Grace lives in New York. If you know what I mean,” my mother said, which was simultaneously clear and mystifying. Given all the ballyhoo about Grace, I certainly remembered she worked in publishing; I knew she’d started as an editorial assistant, one of the few who’d been promoted and was actually working as an editor and a publisher. Of course I remembered that Grace had grown up in Manchester, and she’d learned to ski at Bromley. I knew her family lived in town; I’d been told she was good about coming home to see her parents. It was the bad timing part of my moving to Manchester that was mystifying to me. Molly had to explain my mom’s logic.

My mother had first imagined my meeting Grace when I lived in New York. Then I would have loved living in New York, with Grace, Molly explained. My mom had to rethink how the rest of my life (with Grace) would go, now that I’d moved to Manchester before I met Grace. I asked Molly if my mother had imagined where our children would go to school—that is, if I was a writer in Vermont and Grace kept her publishing job in New York. The trail groomer laughed. “Your mom hasn’t imagined herself as a grandmother, Kid—she’s got all she can handle, managing your life and mine,” Molly said. The ski patroller and I knew how managerial my mother could be.

In 1989, my mom was sixty-seven; Molly, who would only say she was “a year or two older,” was almost seventy. The night groomer said her birthday was “nobody’s business”—she refused to celebrate it. But my mother knew exactly how old Molly was. Little Ray also knew the ski business.

“Ski patrollers don’t last as long as ski instructors, sweetie,” my mom said, in her matter-of-fact way. I didn’t realize, at first, what kind of longevity my mother had in mind. Sensing my concern for Molly’s mortality, my mom explained. Trail groomers were typically men; at Bromley, grooming was mostly a night job. As a night groomer, Molly usually had an eight-hour shift—from when the ski lifts closed at 4 P.M. till midnight. When one of the groomers got sick, Molly would take an occasional night shift, but she’d switched to ski patrol when my mom got tired of waiting up to have a beer with her after midnight. As a patroller, Molly had started out as a strong skier who’d worked hard on her emergency first aid. Molly was a quick thinker who worked well with others; she’d been “the best toboggan handler on a black-diamond run on an icy day when there’s an injured adult skier on the trail,” my mother said, in her breathless way. In my mom’s opinion, Molly was still one of the better toboggan handlers. Some of the older patrollers were “embarrassing,” my mom said. “They shouldn’t be skiing in public with their patrol coats on, sweetie—let them put the Band-Aid on a crying kid in the first-aid room, or let them calm down the distraught mother,” my mother said. She didn’t want Molly to end up in the first-aid room with the crying kids and the distraught moms, or even end up being the patroller who was dispatched to look for the lost kid—instead of being the go-to toboggan handler the old night groomer (for now) still was. “That’s why I’m recommending Molly as a ski instructor, sweetie—ski instructors get better with age, especially at teaching beginners. Molly can be most effective with adult beginners, like those male jocks from other sports—they’re the ones who get hurt or they kill someone else, the first time they go skiing,” my mom told me. “It starts happening with ski patrollers around seventy, or a little older—that’s when they start losing it, sweetie.”

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to put an oxygen tank together, Kid—I still do it the right way, but your mom thinks my days as a patroller are numbered,” Molly said. I knew there wasn’t a lot of crossover among the personnel on ski patrol and in the ski school, but Molly was beloved at Bromley; she could do, or she’d already done, everything on the mountain. She’d filled in as a lift operator—when somebody had to, or nobody else would do it. “Not too tough a job, Kid—there’s a reason the lifties get minimum wage,” I remember her telling me. At Bromley, the lifties were often older locals—men with nothing better to do, waiting for their Social Security checks to come in, Molly told me. “One day, Kid, most of our lifties will be Southern Hemisphere skiers, college kids on their summer break—you just tell them what their job is, and nobody will have to fill in for them,” Molly said.

I had no doubt that the former ski patroller would be a formidable ski instructor. Molly would definitely get the attention of what my mother called the adult beginners; I had a hard time imagining those male jocks from other sports ignoring Molly. “And if you still don’t like skiing with me, sweetie, we both know someone who can probably improve your skiing,” my mom said. That was when I realized there was an objective to my skiing with my mother—namely, if she couldn’t improve my skiing, maybe Molly could.

“What’s wrong with being a full-time fiction writer, kiddo, is you spend more time with the characters you make up than you do with the people you already know and you should have figured out,” Nora told me. I knew Em was being careful not to nod or shake her head; the issue of being a full-time fiction writer was a tricky one for Emily MacPherson.

Em knew the Gallows Lounge wasn’t the only comedy club that was looking over its shoulder. At the end of 1989, we didn’t realize that political correctness was coming; we just knew there was a whole lot of second-guessing going on. The second-guessers who ran the Gallows were like squirrels on the ground, too far from the nearest tree. What used to be funny wasn’t funny anymore—that was all the second-guessers knew.

Nora was fifty-four. “All I know is, I’m getting angrier—not funnier,” Nora said. Em nodded, just once; she was so fast, I almost missed it.

It was December 8, 1989—a Friday night in New York. I remember the usual guys in the Santa suits at the Gallows; at that time of year, there were always some motley Santas in the audience. “Working Santas, for the most part,” the snowshoer said optimistically.

“I’ve seen other kinds of Santas out there,” Nora observed ominously. The Santas in the Christmastime audience had always creeped out Em. Among the fake beards, and what looked like real ones, there were some scary Santas at the Gallows.

“I’ve seen Santas you wouldn’t hire—you wouldn’t let your kids near some of these Santas’ laps,” Nora said.

There’d been a mass shooting in Montreal two days before, and Nora was all worked up about it. Fourteen women had been murdered at an engineering school affiliated with the University of Montreal. The women had been separated from the men; they’d been singled out, purposely targeted. The killer had had a semiautomatic rifle and a hunting knife; he’d shot and killed thirteen women, and had stabbed another woman to death, before turning the gun on himself. Obviously, the École Polytechnique massacre was an anti-feminist attack; the gender of the victims and the killer’s remarks during the attack had made this clear. The killer had said he was “fighting feminism”; it bothered him that the women students were “going to be engineers.” In the media, there were denials of the anti-feminism motive—regardless of what the killer said. “You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists,” the killer had told the women students, before he started shooting. It was a bad choice of material for Two Dykes, One Who Talks. The École Polytechnique massacre would go over like a lead balloon in Nora and Em’s “The News in English.”

Em did her best backstage; she tried to discourage Nora from mentioning the massacre. Em’s backstage pantomime convinced me, but not Nora. Em’s humming of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was the completely wrong accompaniment to her pantomime of misogynist violence against women—this was Em’s point. It was Christmastime in New York, for Christ’s sake; there were a bunch of Santas in the house. And what Nora wanted to vent about wasn’t the least bit funny. But Nora didn’t buy it. When Nora was politically engaged, she was onstage to inflame, not to entertain.

Talk about bad timing—you never saw so many malcontent Santas. “The News in English” had never been such a downer. Yes, it’s easy to say now that it was prescient of Nora to say there would be more misogynist violence against women. There were already advocates for so-called men’s rights who claimed that feminism was responsible for provoking violence against women, Nora was saying; Nora said this would lead to condoning violence against women. Poor Em, I was thinking. There were not a lot of ways for Em to pantomime being paralyzed by fear.

Even the snowshoer seemed distracted, her attention wandering. The pretty Mr. Barlow kept turning around in her chair. She was wary of one of the Santas, a tall one with long arms. He was standing at the back of the lounge, at the farthest distance from the Gallows stage. He looked too lean to be a convincing Santa, although he’d brought a bag of gifts—a long sack, slung over his shoulder. The gift bag wasn’t exactly brimming or overstuffed with presents. Like the standing Santa himself, his bag looked a little lean on contents. This Santa looked like a marauder—like he was stealing stuff, giving nothing away.

“Not a very kid-friendly Santa—not one of your ‘working Santas,’ I guess,” I whispered to the snowshoer.

“Not a working Santa,” the snowshoer whispered back. She kept turning to look at him.

“Some guy in Montreal kills fourteen women in an engineering school, because he doesn’t want women to be engineers. Don’t tell me he wasn’t hunting women—he killed only women!” Nora was shouting. It was hard to watch Em—her gyrations signifying someone trying not to get shot, but she got shot every time. It made some Santas cringe to watch Em die. Other Santas, and not only Santas, were walking out. “The next thing you know, guys will be killing us because we won’t put out for them,” Nora was saying. I saw that a Santa sitting near us had fallen asleep, or he had died—his chin on his chest, his beard askew, the pom-pom on his stocking cap unmoving. Em had stopped moving, too. This was not her pantomime for paralyzed by fear; Em just wasn’t moving. How is Em supposed to pantomime being killed for not putting out? I was wondering. I’d seen people in the audience walk out on “The News in English” before. Pissing people off just meant you were pushing the limits of what was funny—that was what a comedy club was for. But on the night of the Santas, the walkouts weren’t angry; they were bored. I’d not seen Two Dykes, One Who Talks lose an audience at the Gallows before.

I knew Nora had been putting herself down a lot lately. She’d agreed with the ACT UP members who questioned her participation in the group, especially at the demonstrations. Nora loved ACT UP, but now she saw her presence as a distraction or a disruption. What Nora loved about ACT UP was the specificity of the group’s cause and purpose. Nora was always hard on herself, but now she put down her kind of “protest comedy,” as she called it. She was “too broad, too all over the place,” she said. Nora wasn’t a nihilist or an anarchist, but in the world outside the Gallows Lounge, Nora was perceived as nothing but a rabble-rouser, and she knew it. On the night of the Santas, Nora also knew she wasn’t funny—not even at the Gallows. If you were no more than a rabble-rouser, you were just plain boring at the Gallows.

I knew it was not Nora’s best subject for comedy: those men who feel entitled to have women put out for them. Nora had known boys like that, at Exeter. On weekends or on holidays, when she’d come home to the academy campus—both when she was in boarding school at Northfield and when she was a college student at Mount Holyoke—Nora had been hit on by those cocksure boys who presumed she would be grateful for the attention (for any attention). Nora was never pretty; to many men, she was too big, or too masculine. Yet there were certain younger boys who were attracted to her. I suppose they saw an undeniable voluptuousness in the way Nora was too heavy, and you know the kind of arrogant young men I mean—the ones who knew they were good-looking, and that Nora wasn’t.

I understood what Nora looked like to good-looking young men who’d been successful with less-than-attractive women. She looked like she would be a wild ride, as one of my wrestling teammates told me, not knowing Nora was my cousin.

The presumption that she would be easy got to Nora. “Are you kidding me?” she would ask the pretty boys who hit on her at Exeter. Or, if Nora was not in the mood to be nice: “Keep your pecker in your pants, pretty boy, or you could lose it.”

Those good-looking boys weren’t used to being rejected. Nora was well acquainted with the dyke word—it was invariably what those arrogant young men called Nora when she turned them down. Instead of paying attention to Two Dykes, One Who Talks, I was thinking about where the dyke word came from in my cousin Nora’s life. I was proud of Nora for standing up for herself, and for the good use she’d made of the dyke word. Wouldn’t Nora have the last laugh on those hateful boys? I was hoping.

I would later feel terrible for daydreaming at what would be Nora and Em’s last performance onstage at the Gallows. On the night of the Santas, when I wasn’t daydreaming, I was whispering with Elliot Barlow. Em would one day write me and ask me what we’d been whispering about. Surely Nora had noticed us whispering, if Em had. Both Mr. Barlow and I would feel terrible about our whispering, but we should have done something about the Santa standing in the back of the lounge—not just whisper about him. A kind of evil magic, like a spell, seemed to emanate from the tall Santa with the long arms and the skinny sack; there was something strangely witchlike about him. “Maybe he’s a witch in a Santa suit—that’s a broomstick in the gift bag,” I whispered to the snowshoer.

“Not a witch. You don’t recognize him, do you?” the pretty Mr. Barlow whispered. Then, of course, I did—the unfocused vacancy of his multiple hatreds came back to me.

“Our marine…” I’d only started to whisper, but the snowshoer outwhispered me.

“Not a marine. I spoke to Sam—I was going to tell you. The general says our backup heavyweight was never in the Marine Corps. Emory Trowbridge didn’t serve in any other branch of the armed forces, either,” the snowshoer said. That was a sizable deceit to process in one continuous whisper, and just then the sleeping Santa sitting near us fell sideways into the lap of the woman seated next to him. This got a laugh, a small one, but it was more of a laugh than Nora had been getting. The woman grabbed hold of the sleeping Santa’s head, shoving him away from her, but his beard, wig, and stocking cap ended up in her hands. They were both indignant about their sudden contact.

“What? Why’d you do that?” the startled Santa asked the woman next to him, as if she’d assaulted him. This got a somewhat larger laugh, but the woman holding Santa’s beard, wig, and stocking cap, was clearly at a loss for words. Not Nora.

“If you’re going to go down on someone, you should take your Santa stuff off first,” Nora said to the Santa who’d been asleep. This got the biggest laugh Nora would get that night; it caused enough of a disruption for those people who’d been dying to leave to make a break for the exit or the washrooms, or at least bolt for the bar. In the chaos, or in her own harsh judgment of her less-than-riveting performance, Nora didn’t try to bring the audience back; she knew she’d lost them. Besides, Em was giving her the X sign—when Em’s index fingers were crossed, that was as clear to Nora as the no word.

That was when I heard the snowshoer say, “Shit—not a broomstick!” She didn’t whisper. I should never have looked away from our marine, who was not a marine. When I looked again at the back of the lounge now, the small heavyweight had removed the rifle from the long sack slung over his shoulder—not a gift bag, I was thinking, when I saw the tall Santa take aim, sighting down the barrel.

We would later read that there was nothing special about the inexpensive gun—a bolt-action .30-06 Springfield with a magazine that held four rounds. We would learn that it was Emory Trowbridge’s intention to shoot Em first; he’d written in a notebook that he wanted Nora to know Em was dead before he shot Nora. After that, if he had time, he would shoot Mr. Barlow. The fourth bullet was for Emory Trowbridge himself. Not knowing his diary entries, I saw Trowbridge take aim at Em—that was all I knew.

In the dispersing crowd, most of the remaining audience were waiting for the next act, whether they were sitting or standing. From the stage, Nora and Em had the clearest view of the Santa with the long arms and the rifle. They had no reason to recognize Emory Trowbridge; they’d not been at Coach Dearborn’s memorial service. I saw that Em had found a new way to pantomime being paralyzed by fear—Em knew where the gun was pointing. Nora knew, too—Nora never hesitated. Nora couldn’t have looked paralyzed by fear if she tried. It looked almost like a dance move—the way Nora threw her hips into Em, knocking Em to her knees. (How those two loved to dance!) Then Nora stood in front of Em, completely blocking her from the shooter. Notwithstanding the backup heavyweight’s plans, he began by killing Nora; his first shot hit her in her heart.

There was only one shot, but pandemonium broke out and I lost sight of the stage. I knew Nora was down; I assumed Em was down on the stage with her. I’d seen the snowshoer drop to all fours before the first shot was fired. I knew she wasn’t taking cover. Mr. Barlow could move fast on all fours. I watched her make her way through the ankles in the crowd, navigating the legs of chairs and tables. I quickly lost sight of her, but I’d seen where she was headed—toward the shooter. I could have tracked the little English teacher’s progress through the panicked audience, the drinks spilled on tables, the toppled chairs—the suddenly falling people who tripped over the snowshoer, not expecting someone so small to be scampering on all fours—but I didn’t dare take my eyes off Emory Trowbridge. He was watching me, too, but I had nowhere to hide; there were people cowering under the nearby tables, where there was no room for me.

The long-armed Santa was scanning the stage—he could see me, but I knew he was looking for Em. Stay down, stay with Nora, I was wishing for Em. I knew the snowshoer would come in low, level with the tall Santa’s ankles, but there was a wide-open space where the shooter was standing—there was no one near him. It was too big an area for Elliot Barlow to be exposed, I was worrying. Why didn’t Emory Trowbridge just shoot me—what was he waiting for? I was wondering. I’d watched him eject the shell from the first bullet. I’d seen him slide the bolt back and forward; I knew his second shot was in the chamber.

That night at the Gallows, I held my arms straight up, above my head; I waved my hands at Emory Trowbridge. I wanted the backup heavyweight to look at me, only at me. If he was looking at me, maybe he wouldn’t see the snowshoer coming—that was all I was hoping for. Trowbridge held the rifle butt tight to his shoulder, but he wasn’t sighting down the barrel. His indecision made no sense to me. He’d obviously planned this, but he’d stopped shooting. He definitely saw me; he was looking at me, with such loathing, when he suddenly turned his attention to the stage. We both did. People screamed when they saw Em standing onstage, not the same kind of scream as the caterwaul caused by the first gunshot. Em was covered with blood. It was Nora’s blood, I knew. The shooter surely knew whose blood it was. Trowbridge had wanted to shoot Em first; he’d taken aim at Em, before Nora put herself in harm’s way. Yet now, when Em just stood onstage, as still as a statue, the backup heavyweight hesitated. Did Trowbridge hesitate because Em was beseeching him to shoot her?

Em was a pro at pantomime; nothing could have been clearer. She was done with doing paralyzed by fear; she held out her arms to the shooter, palms up, the pose of a supplicant. Shoot me, the pantomimist was begging Emory Trowbridge. You killed the love of my life—please kill me, too. That’s what Em was saying. I started doing jumping jacks, like crazy. “Fuck you, Trowbridge!” I called to him. I just knew it would have killed me if he shot Em. “You were never in the Marine Corps—you never did anything!” I reminded him. But the way he looked back and forth, between Em and me, I knew I was no match for the pantomimist; she was better at beseeching, hands down.

People later said it was the sudden commotion at the back of the lounge that unnerved the shooter. I don’t know; people later said a lot of things. The shooter looked unnerved to me before the pretty Mr. Barlow was anywhere near him. People said the small, older woman on all fours would have unnerved anyone, but I saw how the shooter had hesitated; his hatreds had confounded him. Nothing in his life had gone according to plan. Yes, Elliot was fast on all fours, but I doubt she was moving sideways like a crab (as people later said) when she suddenly scuttled out from under a table. I’m not saying the shooter wasn’t taken aback by the snowshoer, but the small heavyweight had been unable to make up his mind about shooting Em or me. For a split second, he was then confronted by a third choice. Mr. Barlow (as a woman) had cupped his heels in her small, strong hands.

“I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me in the back of my head,” the snowshoer later said. “I’d heard only one shot—I knew two of you were still alive, not which two,” the little English teacher would tell Em and me. But Emory Trowbridge had hesitated too long. Trowbridge was a man of so many hatreds, he couldn’t choose among them. In the sudden commotion at the back of the lounge, all Trowbridge seemed to know for certain was about the bullet he’d been saving for himself. From Em’s and my perspective—begging, as we were, for the tall Santa to shoot us—we were caught off guard when the shooter shot himself. We hadn’t known there was a reason or a purpose for the tall Santa to have such long arms, not until we saw him put the end of the rifle barrel in his mouth—so seamlessly, without a hitch, we knew he’d practiced this part before.

By today’s standards, the Gallows Lounge shooting wasn’t much of a shooting—only two shots were fired. I saw just enough to know that Em and the snowshoer were safe. The tall Santa’s stocking cap was blown off—also his white wig, which was spattered with blood. Of course there was more of a mess, but I saw little of it. Long after the fact, there would be a magazine article about the other Santas in the lounge that night—how they felt about being Santa, if their feelings for Christmas had changed—but I didn’t care how the other Santas were affected by the homicidal and suicidal Santa. Onstage, where I went to hold Em in my arms, I could see how Em would forever be affected—please kill me, too, her eyes, her hands, her whole body was still pleading.