Just before he left he looked at my chemistry set. “Nice setup here, Mitch,” he said, looking at the tubes and beakers, some with tiny rings of frost around them. “Science project?”

“Yessir,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t touch anything too much. I was getting better at making the shells for the Winterbeam, but it still took a good hour of setup and then a day for the stuff to perk before I got a half-dozen shells filled with my special brand of freeze-brew that would turn into a liquid-nitro gas that’d freeze everything it touched within a dozen yard range. And I had six shells right on the counter already; dad’s passing had made me more than a little sloppy.

“Well, I’ll just check out this teacher of yours, Mitch. It’s real important I do that quick. You know why? Because if he is this Snowman character, then the real danger isn’t him popping a lock on a cash box over at JC Penny’s. The real danger is in someone thinking that this’d be the way to solve problems for themselves. We’ve got a nice, quiet town here, Mitch. And I don’t need or want someone who’s read a few too many comic books bringing someone like the Airman or The One down here and having a public fight in our downtown. The comic books show only the cool parts of that- not the cops who get hurt or killed, not the regular joes whose businesses get their storefronts kicked in and their stock blown up, and where are they a week before Christmas?”

He looked at me as if to gauge my understanding. I nodded my head. I had an idea, but couldn’t go much further.

“Mitch,” he said as he walked to the car, “you’re a good kid, and everybody knows it. But if anyone tried to play superhero or supervillain in this town, I would shoot to kill, no matter how much I care about them or anyone else they might be connected to.”

Well, damn. The penny finally dropped. Sheriff Lawson knew what I was doing, but because he’d been sweet on my mom and knew my dad, he was gonna let me go this time and warn me not to do anything in-town, or else.

Fair enough. Later, when I was cleaning up I found that there were only five cartridges. Not the six I woulda sworn on a stack of Bibles had been there before the sheriff’s visit.

The next day the papers had a bit about my science teacher, Mr. Adler. It seemed Mr. Adler had been trying to date one of the cheerleaders (no one called it a mid-life crisis then). He’d been fired from the school and arrested when “evidence was found linking him to a series of robberies’ in town.” I was careful not to be seen trying to follow the case, but I just bet some if not all of that ‘evidence’ was my missing cartridge found on his living room floor when Sheriff Lawson went to have a little chat with Mr. Adler.

So, yeah. I got smarter. I kept the suit (who’d notice a suit? They all looked the same in a newspaper picture back then- all black-and-white, no color), the mask, and used the Winterbeam to freeze locks and pop them open from the back.

And I made sure every job took place in the big city, not in Beantown.

So long as I was careful and didn’t get too greedy, I knew I could pilfer all I needed and the evidence would literally melt away before the cops even knew I’d been in the place. I had nothing to fear from the Airman, The One, the police, or any of the rest now that everyone thought the Snowman was safely behind bars and getting beat up by his fellow inmates on a daily basis over his accusations of statutory rape and his friends in the Young Communist League.

All was...well, not perfect. Our bills were getting paid. My mom was willing to make herself believe I was getting ready for college instead of making my Winterbeam more effective at splashing cold on the ground or squirting nitro into locks. The closest I came to getting caught during that period didn’t come from the cops or the capes, but from a bunch of yahoos who saw me skulking around after I pulled a job on a Macy’s downtown. They didn’t even know I’d robbed the place; all they saw was a guy on the wrong side of town wearing the kind of clothing a young guy’d wear going on a date or a college mixer.

So they chased after me. I blasted the street behind, and some fell. The rest didn’t get the message, and kept on coming after me. I panicked; what if they caught me? I was really more worried about them breaking the Winterbeam or Mom being disappointed in me if she found out for real how I’d been paying the family bills.

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And then one got close. Roaring, yelling, whooping, he’d slicked back his red hair and a letterman jacket- fella who didn’t belong on the wrong side of the tracks himself, by the looks of him. Looking to get plastered on cheap beer with some of his buddies. But there was a certain kind of crazy in his eyes that scared me. I was scared- I don’t mind saying it now. Scared that he’d hurt me, break the Winterbeam, maybe. Wreck what I’d spent a year making, wreck the only thing that was keeping the roof over my Mom’s head and stopped her from crying at night.

So when he got too close, I blasted him with it.

Self defense? I think I yelled for him to back off. No cops anywhere. Besides, what, I’m gonna call the cops for help, when I’m carrying a bag of stolen money in my hands? No, all I know, all I remember was that I wanted him to leave me alone.

So I pulled the trigger.

To this day, I don’t . . . I couldn’t say for sure if I meant to hit him. I ended up blasting his legs, which, well . . . they froze. Not just ‘ouch, frostbite,’ either. They froze solid. I don’t think he even realized what happened until he fell and his legs shattered below the knee, breaking like a couple of china vases.

I have a few regrets in life. But even fifty years later, seeing his legs break off is something that can still get me to wake up in a cold sweat at night.

I ran and found the car I’d parked in an alleyway. Stolen? Yeah. It was easy to boost a car back then if you knew how to pop the lock and cross a few wires. And I did.

I wanted to floor it all the way home, but I knew that drawing the attention of a cop was the last thing I wanted to do. So I went at almost the exact speed limit, until I got to the outskirts of Beantown [not in town, remember. Not in town]. I parked the car near a copse of trees- it was maybe two a.m. - and changed out of the suit and into a pair of bluejeans, a t-shirt and a sweater. Just another teenage kid walking home from a party or something on a Saturday night.

The college kid’s leg-breaking made the Sunday papers, late edition. All of them asking if the Snowman was back, and more evil than ever. A big splash shot showed the poor guy in a hospital bed crying over the ruined stumps of his legs.

I was done. No more Snowman, no more heists. Done. Finito. From now on I decided I’d help out the family budget by mowing lawns or something. I was gonna worry about college, which I hadn’t bothered to apply to, and maybe I’d get in somewhere, some little tiny podunk place and transfer out after I’d gotten a decent number of credits under my belt.

Until I saw Jane.

She was just a few years older than me. But when you’re a seventeen year old boy and a beautiful brunette with her hair parted in the middle wearing red-checked flannel shirt, bluejeans, cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat to boot suddenly starts talkin’ you up at the drugstore while you’re nursing a coke, it makes even the lowest day a thousand feet higher.

What did we talk about? You know, she knew baseball. She also knew high school, and tough times with parents who were gone an’ never coming back...yeah, she’d done her homework on me way before she ‘accidentally’ bumped into me that day. Something in me told me this was too good to be true; pretty cowgirls like her just didn’t put the make on cityboys like me. But all I’d have to do was look at those cherry-red lips and those bright blue eyes and all reason faded away, like trying to track a snowflake in a blizzard.

We spent the afternoon together. I asked for her number, but she said she didn’t have a phone. But that’s okay, she said. Would I like to meet her at the drugstore tomorrow? She was going to be here with a friend or two . . .

I never stood a chance. She might as well’ve handed me a hundred dollar bill, and then asked me if I’d like another one tomorrow. She could’ve told me her friends were Kaiser Whilhem and Karl Marx, and I still would’ve been there like a puppy dog waiting for a second steak dinner.

And guess who her friends were? My head had run through a thousand fantasies where they were a couple of cowgirls just as pretty as Jane was (though a blond and redhead, of course. Variety, spice, life, and all that). But they turned out to be a skinny, dark haired nerd a little taller than me, a chick who was cute but dressed all in yellow and sunglasses on a cloudy day, and another fella in a wheelchair who was a good ten years older’n any of us.

And now, that fella in the wheelchair was sitting across the table from me in my classroom, ten minutes before my ninth-grade biology class was due to file in.

“Thinking about back then, Mitch?” Jake said. He always had that ‘gawl, ain’t life grand?’ smile on his face when he was trying to get you to do something.

“You know I am, Jake.”

Little sum-bickle.

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