The snow outside - Kaoru Yamada 

Katherine Hantz’s district, Oklahoma’s third, had roughly half a million people. The phone calls and letters came in only at a slow drip. It was all filtered through interns and junior staffers, but it was sometimes disappointing how little there actually was, especially when you filtered out the cranks. Katherine was a big believer in democracy, but how could democracy function when only a third of the population voted, and those that did vote had almost zero input on legislation? Because of that, when something was passed along to her, Katherine did her best to respond. She would either send a letter, make a phone call, or in rare cases, go out in person to see what could be done. This was also, in her opinion, a relatively good use of her time, because helping someone meant that she could collect the stories of her constituents. She could say how she’d personally served them. It was good fodder for speeches and anecdotes come election season when she’d be out pressing flesh.

As she drove through the icy streets to the Oklahoma City hospital, hands gripped firm on the wheel, she was writing a speech in her head. She didn’t focus on the specific words she would use, but on what she would say about the subject at hand. Speeches needed to be careful, lest someone quote them later, but the ideas and strategies could be mulled over.

The telephone call had been handled by one of her junior staffers, and it had been brief. The constituent’s name was Ted Sempers, calling to say that his ten-year-old son, Pete, had been attacked by a mutant.

The mutant issue was going to be a hot one in the upcoming election. 1978 was an off year, and turnout would be low, but the real risk for Katherine was in the primary, where it looked like she’d be up against a surprisingly strong challenger who was already campaigning. She’d inherited the seat from her husband, in a manner of speaking, winning it in a special election landslide after he’d lost his life in a car accident. Her next goal was for Wilbur Cunningham’s senate seat when the old man finally retired, but if she was beaten in the primary and ousted as congresswoman, her political aspirations would suffer a tremendous blow.

The ‘mutants’ had started cropping up the year before, early in 1977, almost all of them eight or nine years old. It had started with a few news stories that could easily be dismissed as nonsense, but it rapidly gained steam and authenticity, culminating in a young girl from Missoula floating in the air on the Les Dawson Show.

It was hard to get a handle on how many mutants there were. The scientists studying the phenomenon hadn’t said much of interest, save that it was genetic. They’d been careful to say only that there was a genetic component, extra genes that were visible as lumps in different places on chromosomes, and, of course, they’d called for more funding, because chemical cleavage techniques being what they were, answers weren’t going to be forthcoming anytime soon. Before she’d been a congresswoman, Katherine had worked as a professor at Oklahoma City University, and she’d known a few scientists who weren’t exactly friends, but were the sort of people she could impinge upon. She’d talked to them and read some of the papers, preparing to take a stand. As yet, it wasn’t clear what stand to take, or which way the wind was blowing.

People often talked about politicians as spineless cowards who had no principles to speak of. Katherine hated that view. Politicians were meant to represent their constituents. If the constituents wanted something, it was the job of the politician to enact their will. When the last election had happened, in 1976, there hadn’t been mutants, and Katherine Hantz hadn’t been elected to office on the basis of how she would handle the mutant crisis. Her role, at least as she saw it, was to do what the people wanted her to do, even if that meant voting for bills that she personally didn’t believe in. Unfortunately, the smear that she was a flip-flopper seemed to be working, and was one of the things that would make the primary a difficult one, which was why she’d been careful to only open her mouth on the subject of mutants when she was able to say something vapid and pointless. In the long run, that wasn’t a winning move, but she had no good handle on what her constituents thought, and couldn’t commit until she knew more. She would commission a poll at some point, closer to the actual election.

Ted Sempers, the man who’d called about his son, was a farmer. At first, Katherine had dismissed him as a crank, but one of her junior staffers had placed a call to the hospital and found that at least part of it was true. Ted Sempers’ son, Pete, had been admitted the day before with extensive and extremely odd injuries. For Katherine, it was a chance to help in some small way, or at least collect a story she could tell when asked a question about the mutants. She could say she had concerns, which was nicely noncommittal, and the story would give her waffling answer substance.

Mercy Hospital was busy, but it didn’t take too much waiting before she was led down a sterile corridor to a room where the child was being treated. She waited in the hallway, sitting in a chair next to a young boy who was all alone. It smelled of antiseptic. Katherine hadn’t been in a hospital since the day her husband had died, God rest him. The smell brought back bad memories of how her life had been derailed.

The boy was holding a white rock between his hands and turning it over and over again, head down. The rock was so white that at first she’d almost mistaken it for a snowball. Katherine assumed he was a relative, or maybe a brother.

After not too long, Ted Sempers stepped out of the room. He was a tall man with broad shoulders, and his shirt and pants were stained with sweat and grease. The shoes on his feet were worn and torn, looking like they had needed replacing a year ago. His coat was a good one, which she could imagine him hunkering under on his frozen farmland.

“Ted Sempers?” asked Katherine, standing up.

“Yeah?” he asked, looking her over. She was dressed professionally, in a white blouse with a pearl necklace and a burgundy skirt. Over that, she had a heavy coat. When she’d won, the paper had called her an "unassuming widow," a phrase that had lodged itself in her mind.

“My name is Katherine Hantz,” she said. “I’m the congresswoman from the third district. My office got a call from you, about your son.”

He relaxed marginally. “Oh,” he said. “Thought you was from the state.”

“The state?” she asked.

“The state!” he yelled. “They come here an’ try tellin’ me I was to blame.”

“Excuse me?” she asked. Her voice was mild. Part of being an elected official was having people raise their voice at you sometimes.

“They think I hit the boy,” he said, snorting. “Not that he don’t deserve it sometimes, not that I don’t have a bulldog’s temper, but I jest found ‘im like that, him an’ his fren.” He gestured at the other boy. He looked Katherine up and down. “You gonna do somethin’ about this? ‘Bout these mutants?” He said the word like it was an unfamiliar slur that would take some getting used to before he could start using it with aplomb.

“We’re looking into all avenues,” she said. “It’s a new problem, and it’s bound to be the case that new problems require new solutions.” It was the unfortunately vapid kind of thing she’d said a lot of since the mutant issue had cropped up.

“Well,” he replied. “Git on it.” He stormed off, not saying anything more.

Katherine stayed there for a moment, looking after him and wondering whether the trip would be a total waste. It was even possible that it would be worse than a waste. Ted might be the sort of person who would get up to give a testimony about how he’d asked for help and she’d done nothing. She turned to the door and looked into the hospital room. She wouldn’t be getting anything from the boy, Pete. He was in worse condition than she’d known. His face was swollen and purple, as were his hands. Whatever had happened to him had happened over his whole body. He had a breathing tube down his throat, and that probably meant that he was sedated, or possibly nonresponsive.

Her husband had been like that for a time.

Katherine sat down in the chair, next to the other little boy, the friend. He was still rotating the white rock in his hands.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said to him, after a few moments had passed.

“Yeah,” he replied, not looking up.

“Where are your parents?” she asked, after letting the silence stretch for a bit.

“Pa’s at work, ma’s at home,” he replied. “Mister Sempers was gonna give me a ride back.” He briefly glanced down the hallway, then back down at his rock. It was about the size of a baseball and pockmarked with small holes.

“Can you tell me what happened to Pete?” she asked. She used the calm, gentle voice she used with her own children, though they were much younger.

He finally looked away from the rock and over to her. “They say I’ve got to talk to a detective,” he said. “So they can catch the guy.”

“But you haven’t yet?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, shaking his head and looking back at his white rock.

Katherine waited a bit. “You said it was a ‘guy’?” she asked. “Not a kid.”

The boy tensed up for a moment, then looked at her. “I — I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” replied Katherine. “I know this is hard for you, having your friend hurt, but you’re doing very well. I was just hoping to get a few answers, so that I can help in any way I can. All I know right now is that a mutant attacked your friend Pete.” There was another long gap of silence. “I’m a congresswoman. Do you know what that means?”

He shook his head.

“That means that I’m one of the people who write laws,” said Katherine. “These mutants, they’re very new, which means that some of the bad things that they can do aren’t even against the law yet. So one of the things I get to do is help write new laws that will punish people who do bad things.”

The boy didn’t give her the reaction she’d thought he would. He flinched. It occurred to her that this boy was about nine or ten years old, just the right age to be one of the mutants. She kept that from showing on her face.

“And if people with powers make mistakes,” she said. “If mutants have these strange and new abilities that they can’t fully control, then we need to make sure the law protects them. No one should get arrested for an accident, at least in my opinion.”

The boy relaxed, shoulders sagging.

“What’s your name?” asked Katherine.

“Harold, ma’am,” he replied. He looked her in the eyes as he said it, then returned to his rock.

“Harold, what can you tell me about what happened to Pete?” she asked.

“Me and Pete were playing in his backyard, ma’am,” he said. “And then out of nowhere there was this man, or I guess he was maybe a kid, and he just picked Pete up and squeezed him like a grape.” He didn’t meet her eyes as he told this story.

Katherine had read up on police interrogations as part of background on a bill that would have prohibited certain techniques from being used by federal agencies. The Reid technique was a method of interrogation pioneered in the 1950s by a former police officer from Nebraska, and Katherine had been a little horrified by the stories of its effectiveness, particularly because of how often it obtained false confessions. Still, some of the lessons had stuck with her, and she already knew that this boy, Harold, wasn’t telling her the truth.

“Harold, we know that you’re not telling the truth,” she said. “We know that what happened wasn’t what you meant to happen. Everyone makes mistakes, Harold, but what we have to do is to make sure that those mistakes don’t lead to worse mistakes. I want to help you, and to help Pete. To help, I need to know exactly what happened.”

Harold let out a breath he’d been holding in. “It was a man, or a kid, like I said. Me and Pete were just playing.”

“You were playing,” said Katherine, trying to keep her voice soothing. “You didn’t mean for any of this to happen. You didn’t want Pete to get hurt. He’s your friend, and I can see that you’re a good boy, and you're a good friend.”

This was all ethically dubious. Katherine had a background in law. She’d gone to Smith College and later, Yale Law. She’d passed the Oklahoma bar, though she’d never practiced, instead opting to teach at the university until her husband’s untimely death. She hadn’t done anything illegal yet, not in talking to this child who’d been left all alone, but coercing a confession from a minor was enough to raise anyone’s eyebrow. She found some consolation in reminding herself that she wasn’t acting as an agent of the state or officer of the law. Until she directed any of the resources at her disposal, she was just a private citizen.

“We were just playing,” said Harold, echoing her words.

“So what I need to know,” said Katherine, “Is whether you did it on purpose, or whether it was just an accident.” That was a part of the Reid technique, offering a false dichotomy.

Harold looked at her with confusion written on his face. “I didn’t do it, ma’am. It was Pete.”

She watched him for a bit. “Pete did this to himself?” she asked.

Harold nodded once, then looked at his rock. “We were just playing,” he said. “And he kept wanting to push it further, and I wanted him to go further too, and finally one of us said it, I don’t know who, and I guess then we were … we were caught up in it.”

“Pete had a power,” said Katherine. Pete was a mutant. “Can you tell me what power he had?”

“He could move,” said Harold. “He was faster than the wind. He’d be here one moment and somewhere else the moment after that, like lightning. We knew he was a mutant, but we couldn’t figure out how it was working. We thought he was just fast, but then he went up into the air, a thousand feet almost, and for a bit he was just standing there, and I blinked and he was back on the ground.”

“Injured?” asked Katherine.

“No,” replied Harold, shaking his head. “No, he was just fine, not even off-balance. So we did that for a bit, or he did, going way up high and falling down, then blipping back to the ground at the last second.” He paused, and Katherine let the silence stretch. “And then one of us, I don’t know who, saw it there, and we thought, I guess both of us …” He trailed off again.

“Saw what there?” asked Katherine. She tried to think. “You picked a different destination?”

Source: megan.d.miller