Roy fell asleep while he was watching a movie on TV about a twelve year old boy who’s living in an isolated mountain cabin with his parents. His father is a failed writer, a novelist, and he’s sickly; he should be living in a better climate, not in a snowbound redoubt with a wife who doesn’t love him and a child who is not really his own. The boy’s real father is the sick man’s brother who the boy thinks is his uncle, a bank robber who shows up at the mountain retreat during a blizzard with a bullet wound in one leg, accompanied by two cohorts, a third having been captured during the getaway wherein two cops were killed. The bank robber is the boy’s mother’s old boyfriend; his brother married her to give the boy a home and a family. She’s still in love with the bad brother, who intends to escape the manhunt by hiking over a supposedly impassable mountain trail. There’s also a bleach blonde floozy, a warbler who can’t carry a tune, who’s hung up on the bank robber, as well as a handyman who lusts after the boy’s mother and begs her to let him take her away from the invalid novelist. The boy is the hero, the only one who can lead the criminals over the dangerous pass.
Roy woke up just as the movie was ending. He was ten, two years younger than the intrepid boy, and he wondered if, given a similar circumstance, he would behave as bravely. His own mother had married her third husband a few months before, but Roy knew it wouldn’t last. They were fighting all the time and Roy did not want to continue living with them. He loved his mother but she was constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Roy had overheard her talking on the telephone to his grandmother telling her she needed to be hospitalized or sent to a sanitarium, somewhere she could rest. Otherwise, his mother said, something terrible might happen. Roy figured this meant one of three things: that she would kill herself or her husband, or that her husband would kill her.
Roy didn’t care about his stepfather. The best solution, Roy thought, would be for him to go away, to admit the marriage had been a mistake and leave Roy and his mother alone. It was a week before Christmas and snow was falling. Roy put on his parka and galoshes and went out the back door. He decided that if his mother and her husband did not separate, he would be the one to go. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and there was no light left in the sky. Roy walked into the alley behind his house. He was standing still, letting the snow cover him, when he heard shots, four of them in rapid succession.
Teddy Anderson, a nephew of Roy’s neighbors Sven and Inga Anderson, came into the alley from behind the Andersons’ garage holding a gun, an automatic. Teddy saw Roy and waved to him with his hand holding the gun. Teddy was twenty years old, he had always been nice to Roy, but Roy knew that Teddy was often in trouble with the law and that his uncle and aunt were trying to straighten him out. Teddy fired a shot into a garbage can behind Johnny Murphy’s house, then he fell down and stayed there. Roy went over to him and saw that in his other hand Teddy was holding a bottle of brandy. He had passed out. Roy took both the gun and the bottle out of Teddy’s hands and put them on the ground just inside the passageway next to the Andersons’ garage, then he went back and dragged Teddy by his left leg out of the middle of the alley and propped him up against the garage door, just in case a car came through and the driver couldn’t see Teddy lying in the snow.
When he’d heard the shots, Roy thought they could possibly have come from inside his house. If his mother was dead, since his father had died two years before, a court would probably order him to live with his grandmother, which he did not want to do. In this circumstance he would just run away, get out of Chicago, hop a freight train or hitchhike west, to California or Arizona, somewhere warm, like the writer in the movie should have done.
He looked at Teddy Anderson leaned against the garage door, sound asleep. Roy was surprised nobody had come into the alley after hearing the shots. He did not feel guilty about being disappointed that neither his mother nor his stepfather had been murdered. Roy walked back into the passageway, picked up the automatic and put it into his coat pocket. He would hide the gun somewhere in his room until he really needed to use it.