"Now where is he?"

  It wasn't totally uncommon for our parents to spring for a pizza and a couple big plastic bottles of soda when they needed information.  "Get out of here," a brother ordered when one of the sisters came from a bedroom and started to enter the kitchen.  Wild-eyed, our mother told a phoned mother of one of the other boys who was rolling the slices and putting them into coat pocket.  "So I'll have it for later," he said to my Dad's tired afterwork kinda blankstare.

  "Did they do anything else bad today?"

  "Like they could do anything worse."

  The new priest had just come to town.  It had been a long week.  After a mass that wasn't a real Mass because it was just readings and singing, and the real police taking over the offices of Peace Officers, and almost half the really cool teachers at school going away to "overseas," our mother had stuck up for "teenage hooligans" who weren't actually committing any crimes by having "a wild rumpus".  In doing so, though, they'd inspired several neighborhoods' kids to near-rebellion.  And now the priest was MIA and the most anybody would say was Loose Lips Sink Ships.  

  One boy ate the edges, another the middle of another slice, and the saving-for-later ate the pieces of crust like a rabbit eating lettuce.

  A littler brother came in the front door hung gardening gloves, knit hat, and winter coat all clumped with iceballs on a hook just over his height but not as high up as Dad's, and worked the oversize golashes off one foot at a time.  Mom's longjohn legs started to slip down without the socks to hold them up and by the time he got to the kitchen it looked like he was dragging half a man behind him.  "What's wrong?" A brother asked of red face and tearing up eyes.  "I had to give the shovel back."

  The crust-eater took a rolled up slice of pizza out of a pocket and flattened it neat on a paper towel.  "Hungry friend?" Our mother said, "Oh no." Pulled the papertowel'd pizza towards her and grabbed the little brother's shirt.  Pulling him by the back of the tee-shirt until he was firmly in her lap.  She poured fresh soda into her glass, turned the lipstick on the edge away from her, and the little brother gulped down a glass worth.

  "What's going on out there Mister?"

  "Well, it seems the detectives needed a plow-path to," he craned his neck around and asked, "Should I say it?" Mama looked at Dad and put her hands on the back of brother's neck like it was a furnace, and said, "You can.  It's alright now."

  "So the detectives needed to get to the Crime Scene and put the Garbage Man in charge of the whole highway system."

  "Really?" My Dad turned his head and looked at Mom.  Then asked the brother, "The whole highway system?"

  One fat smooth tire tread had been the only marring of a perfect snowfall covering up what had been World War Three and a half between igloos.  That was in the early, early morning.  And as was custom, the newspaper's plastic had been tucked into what someone had dubbed our bark telephone booth.