Free Reunion by Hugh Fox

really would be a great day for snowmen. If it had been just a little warmer …
    Maybeworld. Maybe unlucky to rouse Fred, maybe just a little warmer, maybe better to never have come at all, Buzz remembering back almost fifty years, when Fred had just moved into their neighborhood, from where he didn’t have the slightest idea, his mother either a widow or divorced, working for a liquor company downtown somewhere so there was always a cabinet in the dining room of their apartment filled with fancy liqueurs that they’d sometimes sample a little when his mom wasn’t there, Buzz in third year high school when Fred had first moved in, Fred a little older than Buzz, already done with high school (he’d been in a seminary), working nights as a dispatcher for Yellow Cab downtown, going to Loyola by day, a couple of courses a term, slowly working his way toward a degree in English which somehow, somewhere along the line, got switched to a degree in Sports Medicine, Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, the world-center for sports EVERYTHING.
    He forgot how they first met. Maybe in church. Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. He’d gotten interested in Ellen, they’d gotten engaged, he’d gone into the Navy and they’d gotten married with him in his Lieutenant J.G. (Junior Grade) whites. The Korean Conflict, wasn’t it? Like remembering Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Rome against Carthage, the Barbarian Sacking of Rome …
    For years Fred and him getting together every Saturday afternoon and “talking books.” Fred read like a maniac. All the new things.
Ten North Frederick
. John O’Hare. He was the hot one. And Hemingway’s
Old Man and the Sea
. And Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
, which Buzz had always seen as a kind of replication of his own life, everything so Catholic, and him in love with Petra Rossini who lived on the Near North Side and whose father was this big surgeon and they were loaded. The latest Waugh, the latest Graham Greene, Mauriac, Sigrid Undset. They seemed to always be reading more Catholic authors than anyone else. It was really such a Catholic world, but there weren’t any American Catholic authors of note, so they always turned to the French and English and (Undset) even Scandinavians. It hardly made any difference where they were from as long as they were Catholic. Catholic meant universal anyhow, didn’t it? Fred always aspiring to be a writer. And he was great. Great satirist. When he satirized Frank O’Hare, he really nailed him like a hawk to the barn door. Would send everything out to the
New Yorker
and the
Hudson Review
. Mainly to the
New Yorker
. And they’d never taken anything. In fact the most they’d ever done was move the paper clip on one of his submissions. Which had been a major event in itself: “Look, Buzz, you can see the original indentation and where they moved it to. They actually moved the paper clip!”
    But that’s all they ever did, he kept writing for a couple more years, always the same printed rejection notices, and finally moved into Sports Medicine, had gotten the job at Northwestern, mainly working with their football team. Doing research on leg injuries. A Fulbright professorship to Stockholm, he’d fallen, slipped in front of a bus and had lost a leg. But not quickly. Endless operations. Casts and splints and therapy, the leg finally just giving up the ghost. He used to always laugh about it, “It just gave up, committed suicide!”
    Fred, for his part, submitting his crap everywhere, getting published everywhere—
The Paper Towel Review: Read It, Wipe Your Ass With It, Discard It, Only the Best in Discardable Literature
. He loved the titles:
The Nipple Review, Merde, Outer-Inner Space, Dogbite, Broken Knuckles, Down the Drain, Underside
, even some of the university quarterlies like
Tri-Quarterly
from Northwestern itself, Fred one time almost pushing Buzz a little too far when