Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,44

of three pre-installed pins and holes, not unlike the Howitzer Mark IV artillery used in Korea and elsewhere), stalled. The blizzard’s snow was evidently so heavy and wet that it had clogged the rotating system of eight razor sharp blades, and the Snow Boy’s self-protective choke had stalled the engine (whose turbine was also the blades’ rotor) instead of allowing the engine’s cylinders to overheat and melt the pistons, which would ruin the expensive machine. The Snow Boy was, in this respect, little more than a modified power lawnmower, which our neighbor Mr. Snead was proudly the first on our street to get one of, and had turned it over for the neighborhood children’s inspection after disabling the spark plugs—he emphasized several times that one must disable the lawnmower’s spark plugs if you were going to place any part of your hands near the blades, which he said rotated at over 360 rpm of torque and could slice a man’s hand off before he even knew what was happening—and the window’s side panel’s schematic view of the Snow Boy’s moving parts was based closely on Mr. Snead’s explanation of how his power lawnmower was put together to mow his grass with only a featherlight touch on the controls. (Mr. Snead always wore a tan cardigan sweater, and beneath his surface bonhomie seemed palpably sad, and our mother said that the reason he was so friendly to the neighborhood children and even gave each of us a Christmas present for several years was because he and Mrs. Snead couldn’t have any children of their own, which was sad, and which my brother said privately was due to Mrs. Snead’s back alley abortion as a roundheel teen, which at the time I don’t believe I understood enough to feel anything other than sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Snead, both of whom I liked.) As I recall it now, the Sneads’ lawnmower had been orange as well, and much larger than its modern descendants. I did not, though, initially recall the window’s narrative including any explanation of what fate befell the smaller, subordinate feral dog, with the sore, whose name was Scraps, and had run away from home because of the way its owner mistreated it when the tedium and despair of his lower level administrative job made him come home empty-eyed and angry and drink several highballs without any ice or even a lime, and later always found some excuse to be cruel to Scraps, who had waited alone at home all day and only wanted some petting or affection or to play tug of war with a rag or dog toy in order to take its mind off of its own bored loneliness, and whose life had been so awful that the backstory cut off abruptly after the second time the man kicked Scraps in the stomach so hard that Scraps couldn’t stop coughing and yet still tried to lick the man’s hand when he picked Scraps up and threw him in the cold garage and locked him in there all night, where Scraps lay alone in a tight ball on the cement floor coughing as quietly as he could. Meanwhile, in the main narrative row, his mind distracted by concern over his blind daughter’s sadness and the hope that his wife, Marjorie, was OK driving in the blizzard to look for Cuffie, Mr. Simmons, using his blue collar strength to easily turn the stalled Snow Boy device over onto its side, reached into the system of blades and the intake chute in order to clear them of the wet, packed snow that had gotten compressed in there and jammed the blade. Normally a careful worker who paid good attention and followed directions, this time he was so distracted that he forgot to disable the Snow Boy’s spark plugs before reaching in, as the schematic panel with an arrow and dotted line at the intact spark plugs showed. Thus, when enough of the packed snow had been removed to allow the rotor to turn freely, the Snow Boy sprang into life on its side while Ruth Simmons’ father had his hand deep inside the intake chute, severing not only Mr. Simmons’ hand but much of his forearm, and badly splintering his forearm’s bone all the way down to the bone marrow, with a horrifying full color spray of red snow and human matter jetting at full force straight up into the air (the Snow Boy being on its side, its chute