The Snow Devil

The bus dropped me at the top of the cliff road at ten in the morning, and I have to tell you, my first thought was that Bette's directions were garbage. She'd written three lines on the back of a grocery receipt. "Follow the sound of sanding," was literally one of them. Who writes that?

But consider this, and I mean it in the plainest way possible: it worked. I followed a sound of sanding, and it led me straight to the jet market.

Quick background so you're not lost. I'm Ren Gomez, forty-five years old, soldier, currently on leave and currently sulking about it. Six months ago I ended a three-year relationship with a civilian named Brad, and my brilliant plan for getting over it was to fly to Brazil in the off-season and housesit for my friend Bette Rowe, who is forty-one and has known me eight years and who apparently owns a house with a pool and a broken porch light and a side business selling craft supplies to tourists. She left me a list. The list had forty-one items on it. I counted.

One of the items said: take this message to the jet market before Thursday. The message concerned a shipment of something called bezel compound, and Bette had underlined it twice, which for Bette is basically a legal document.

So there I was, walking into this huge open-air building near the cliffs, all stone posts and timber beams and tarps rolled up against the eaves, and it was empty. Or it looked empty. Off-season, right? Nobody in their right mind works the off-season.

Then I heard the sanding again, and I followed it like a lost dog follows a smell.

She was at a long bench near the back, hunched over a piece of jewelry the size of a coin, with a brush so small I honestly thought she was holding a splinter. Dark hair pinned up with what looked like a pencil. She was maybe thirty-nine, forty. She did not look up. She did not look up for a long time, actually, and I just stood there foolishly holding a grocery receipt.

Finally I coughed. She flinched, put the brush down with the care of a surgeon setting down a scalpel, and turned.

"Oh! Goodness, you scared me," she said. "How long were you standing there?"

"About two minutes. Sorry. I knocked on a post. It didn't really make a knock sound."

"It wouldn't, it's a post." She laughed, and it came out easy, like she wasn't performing it. "You must be Bette's soldier. She mentioned you."

"Ren." I put out my hand.

"Pia. Pia Wiseman." Her handshake was firm and her fingers had black specks on them, paint or soot, I couldn't tell. "Did she send the compound?"

"She sent a message about the compound. Whether the compound itself exists is above my pay grade." I held out the receipt. "She underlined it twice."

Pia read it and made a face. "Ah. So it's stuck in customs again. Wonderful. That's the third time." She sighed and looked back at her bench. "Do you want to see what I'm ruining in the meantime?"

That's an invitation I never turn down, so I came around the bench and looked, and I'll admit I didn't understand what I was looking at. It was a ring, or the top of one, silver, with a black stone set in it and a rim around the stone. The rim had a chip in it the size of, I don't know, a grain of rice? Smaller.

"So this is a bezel," she said, tapping the rim. "It's the metal that holds the stone in. This one came in with a chip in the paint on the rim, right here, see? Client wants it retouched before the season opens. So I mix the paint, and I fill the chip, and I let it cure, and then I do it again, maybe six times, because each layer has to be thinner than the last one or it sits proud and you can feel it with your thumbnail."

"You can feel a paint chip with your thumbnail?"

"Anyone can, if it's bad. Most people don't look that closely. But I know it's there, so I have to fix it." She said it like that settled the matter, like the whole universe agreed with her, and I remember thinking, huh, I like this person.

"How long does one chip take?"

"This one? Nine days so far." She picked the brush back up. "Watch this, don't breathe."

She did not breathe. Neither did I, which was rude of me, following instructions like that. She touched the brush to the chip and laid down a line of black so fine I genuinely could not see it happen. The line just appeared. Then she sat back and blinked a few times and looked at me like she was surfacing from underwater.

"Sorry, what were we talking about? I go somewhere when I do that."

"You were somewhere else entirely, yeah."

"It's the best part of the job, honestly. The quiet months, the empty market, one tiny problem to solve." She glanced out at the gray sky past the eaves. "It's been a strange cold snap, though. Have you felt it? This is Brazil. We're not supposed to need socks."

I had felt it. I'd been wearing a jacket Bette lent me since the bus, which is not a sentence I expected to say about this trip.

While Pia got back to mixing paint, an older guy came out from a side room wiping his hands on an apron. Big fellow, gray beard, hands like baseball mitts. He looked me over the way you look at a board you're deciding whether to buy.

"You the housesitter?" he said.

"That's me. Ren."

"Hugh Briggs. Fifty-two years old, twenty of them married to the same long-suffering woman, and I work wood." He shook my hand and crushed approximately half of it. "Come here, I want to show you something before Pia makes you sit still and not breathe too."

I followed him to his corner of the market, which smelled of birch and glue, and he pulled a cloth off a set of boxes. And okay, I know I'm a soldier and not an art critic, but these things were gorgeous. Five boxes, each one fitting inside the next, made of birch bark, the grain curling on the lids like frozen smoke.

"These are for a client in São Paulo," he said. "Nested boxes. The bark has to rest for months before you can bend it, and then you get one chance. One! You crack it, you start over with next year's bark." He lifted the smallest lid and set it back down. It closed with a soft click, no gap, nothing. "Perfect fit. Took me four sets to get here."

"What happens to the failed sets?"

"Burned in my stove, and I complain about it to my wife, and she tells me to stop complaining and eat dinner." He grinned. "She's right, by the way. She usually is."

"That's a good arrangement."

"It's the only arrangement that works, Ren." He put a hand on my shoulder, which was also crushing. "So. Bette's list. Forty items?"

"Forty-one."

Hugh laughed so hard he had to sit down on his own workbench. "She gave me thirty-eight when I watched the place in twenty-one! She's adding items every year. By 2030 it'll be a hundred. You'll be there painting her shutters with a toothbrush."

Pia called over from her bench, "Does the list mention my worktable?"

"No," I said, checking the receipt for comedy. "Nothing about tables."

"Well, it should have, because I need one moved and I can't move it alone, and Hugh's back is out, which he won't admit."

"It is not out," Hugh said, sitting very carefully.

"See? That's how a man with an out back sits." She stood and stretched, and I tried to be polite about not noticing and probably failed. "There's a worktable in the back storeroom, oak, weighs as much as a small car. I need it out here by the west wall so I can lay out a full display before the season opens. Would you help me with it? Now, if your list allows?"

"The list doesn't say anything about tables," I said, "so technically the list permits anything."

"That's the spirit. Bette will be furious, which is half the fun."

Hugh pointed at me with a stick of sandpaper. "Careful, Ren. She'll have you sanding bezels next. Then it's over for you. You'll be here nine days on one chip."

"Nine days sounds restful," I said.

And that's when the wind changed. I didn't know what it was at first, just that the air coming off the cliffs went weird, all wrong, a low hissing sound like the whole sky had started purring. Pia froze with her brush in the air. Hugh stood up fast, back or no back.

"What is that?" I asked.

Pia was already moving toward the open side of the market, staring out at the flat scrubland behind the building. "Oh my God. Oh my goodness. Is that... Ren, come look at this. You have to see this, right now."

I came. Everybody comes, when somebody says it like that.

What I saw made no sense at all. Out on the flat scrubland, maybe two hundred meters off, a column of white was standing up and spinning. Not smoke. Not dust. It looked like somebody had taken a slow blender to the sky and dropped the result on the ground.

"Is that a tornado?" I asked.

"It's a snow devil." Pia was practically bouncing. "A dust devil, but with snow. I've never seen one here, never. Have you?"

"I've seen sand ones in Djibouti. Never snow. In Brazil."

"I know, right?"

Hugh came up beside us and squinted at it. "That's the strangest cold snap in twenty years of this place. Twenty years, mind. The old farmers say the air off the cliffs has been wrong all week." He folded his arms. "Well. It's not coming at us. Back to work, both of you, before you turn into tourists."

The devil wandered off toward the far fence line and collapsed after a minute or two, like it got bored of existing. We all stood there a beat longer than grown adults should, and then Pia turned to me with the biggest grin.

"You have to admit, that's a good omen for the season."

"Or a bad one. Nobody in this story is qualified to say."

We moved the table. That's the short version. The long version is that the oak worktable was every bit as heavy as advertised, the storeroom was a maze of rolled canvas and old crates, and Hugh supervised from a stool with a beer, offering advice nobody asked for. Getting it through the doorway took four pivots, one of which involved me flat on my back laughing while Pia held her end and refused to drop it on my face, which I appreciated.

By the time it was settled against the west wall, the light had gone gray-blue and Hugh announced he was done for the day. "Marina expects me at seven. If I'm late she starts without me, and by starts I mean eats my portion of dinner." He shrugged into an enormous coat. "Ren. Pia. Goodnight. Ren, come back Thursday with your bezel compound message and I'll show you how I fit the lids."

He left. And then it was just Pia and me and this enormous open room with the tarps rolled up and the cliffs hissing softly in the distance.

"Beer?" she said. "There's a fridge in the back. It's mostly empty but it has beer. This is not a complicated offer."

"It's a great offer. Yes."

She came back with two longnecks and no opener, so she popped one cap on the edge of the new worktable and handed me the bottle, and we sat on the storeroom stools like two people hiding from the end of the workday. The beer was cold and cheap and exactly right.

"So," she said. "You never answered my question from earlier. Why is a forty-five-year-old soldier housesitting in Trancoso during a cold snap?"

"How do you know I'm forty-five?"

"Bette. She wrote me a letter in October. She writes everyone letters. She said, and I quote, 'I'm sending you a friend named Ren, he's forty-five, he's military, and he needs to look at the ocean for a while. Be nice to him but not too nice.'" Pia took a swig. "Her words. I have the letter at home. I could show you."

"Bette needs supervision."

"She really does. So. The ocean. Why?"

I looked at my beer for a while. Not because the answer was secret. Because I hadn't said it out loud to anyone yet, and saying things out loud for the first time is always heavier than it should be.

"I ended a three-year relationship six months ago," I said. "His name is Brad. He's a civilian, a good guy, and we wanted completely different lives. He wanted a house and a garden and me home more than I was away. I couldn't give him that. So I gave him back everything else. I cried in an airport afterward, in uniform, over an orange juice."

"That's a hard kind of ending."

"It's the worst kind. Nobody did anything wrong. We just ran out of overlap." I shrugged. "So Bette sent me here, where nothing overlaps with anything, and gave me forty-one chores, and I've been going a little mad in an empty house with a pool nobody can use because it's forty degrees."

Pia laughed, that full laugh again, the one from when I first walked in. "Forty-one chores. She's a menace."

"What about you? Why does a jeweler spend the off-season alone in a giant market?"

"I'm not alone, Hugh's here. And I like it quiet. I came here eight years ago for a summer and never quite left. There was a man, an artisan who visited two years back, but that was brief and friendly and he lives in Portugal now, so that's that." She turned her bottle slowly on her knee. "Can I tell you something? Can I say a thing and have you not laugh?"

"I have never been less likely to laugh at someone. I just told you I cried in an airport."

"Good, because here it is. I'm terrified of this commission." She pointed her bottle across the room at the new table. "The display I'm setting up. It's for a collector in São Paulo, the same client Hugh's boxes are for. Twelve pieces, my best work, due before the season opens. If he likes it, he funds my whole year. If he doesn't, I go back to repairing tourist bracelets and pretending that's the plan."

"That's not nothing."

"It's really not nothing. I've been retouching one bezel chip for nine days because I can't stop seeing flaws. Nine days, Ren. I dream about the chip. I've named the chip." She put