The Canadian Civil War: Volume 3 - West to the Wall

by William Wresch

Chapter 24

  The blizzard

  The sun was up, but that didn’t mean it was much warmer out on the street. But I found myself standing, looking at the city. I saw a few pedestrians, all locals. The guys with rifles were still sleeping in I guessed. I watched one car go by with luggage strapped to the top and the back seat filled with kids. Good. One family gone. I waited for a few minutes, hoping to see more leave. No such luck. Folks might be leaving, but there was no major exodus – at least not one I could see. I guess that was too much to hope for.

  As I stood looking, I began to feel the cold. It was cold every morning, but somehow this felt different. During my first Green Bay winter, I thought I would freeze to death, but I gradually got used to it. My first couple weeks in Dakota I learned what real cold felt like. Or at least I thought I did. As I stood there, I felt a new level of cold. It was after eight and the sun was above the horizon, but the temperature was dropping, not rising. I was heavily dressed, but already the cold was deep in my thighs. Something was up. My cheap little cell phone did not have a weather app, so I would have to wait for details, but for the moment, I knew it was time to get off the street. I began a fast walk to the hotel.

  Back at the hotel, I noticed the line of trucks out front seemed a bit shorter. Maybe a few of them had started south? Maybe that wishful thinking. Inside, the lobby looked like a set from a disaster movie – there were bodies everywhere. Apparently the management had let people sleep wherever they dropped after a night of drinking. There was probably some municipal code against that, but it didn’t seem humane to throw people out in the cold. So letting them sleep on the floor or on a row of chairs was probably the right thing to do. Based on the smell, they seemed to need showers as well as beds, but that was their problem. Maybe a night sleeping in the cold lobby would convince a few of them to go back home.

  There was a young clerk behind the registration desk. Sioux by the look of him. He was staring at the mass of prone humanity in the lobby.

  “The temperature seems to be dropping. Do you know what’s going on with the weather?”

  “The barometer is dropping like a rock. They haven’t announced a blizzard warning yet, but I would expect to hear something in the next couple hours.”

  “Bad?” Leave it to me to ask the obvious.

  “These are storms that kill people on the highway. I don’t think these guys are going anywhere for two or three days.”

  “Even if they left right now?”

  “Maybe if they left right this minute and went straight south or east. I know some of the locals are leaving, but they are headed east and left already. They should be fine. These guys? They are here for the duration.” He didn’t sound real pleased about that prospect, but it was clear he would deal with it as necessary. I thought about talking to a few of them, warning them, maybe encouraging them to get out in time, but as I looked around the lobby I saw no sign of life. These guys had been up all night drinking. They were in no shape to move, and certainly in no shape to dodge a blizzard.

  “Do you have enough food for two or three days?”

  “Food we have. Beer they finished off last night. The harder stuff will be gone pretty fast.”

  “Maybe that is for the best.”

  “Yes.”

  I went back to my room and found Foster waiting for me in the hallway.

  “You and I have a few things to talk about.”

  “Really?” I was surprised by his presence and really had no idea what we would talk about, but I invited him into my room. Who knew, this might be interesting. I took a chair in the corner, and he sat at the end of the bed. I doubted the coil springs there would ever uncoil again.

  “If we are going to talk,” I began, “why not tell me why those men followed you to that village. Money? Some wild story? Your charm?”

  “My charm of course. But let’s not talk about what has passed.”

  “You mean you won’t tell me.”

  “I won’t do your homework for you. Besides, you need to be thinking about the future.”

  “I do. I think about when your people will go back to the desert.”

  “They will, but you need to think about your more immediate future. Some of the men downstairs don’t like you.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I am not a danger to you, but those men are. They know you were with the Sioux that killed their friends. You said so yourself talking to a reporter. They don’t like what happened to their friends.”

  “What happened is their friends burned down a house and took over a school.”

  “So you say. They see it differently. I have kept them off you so far, but I cannot watch your back all the time.”

  “It can’t be too hard, they are all passed out on the floor.”

  “They will be up soon enough, and you will be a target.”

  “Why tell me this?”

  “We Americans need to stick together. Besides, I do you a favor, maybe someday you will do me one.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “But I shall.” At this point he managed to pull himself into a vertical position, how is a mystery to me and to modern physics. He didn’t make an effort to shake hands. He knew that was a non-starter. Instead, he opened the door and slid through it sideways. I wondered how big a door had to be for man-mountain to go through it normally.

  With him gone, I gave some thought to the threat. Was it real? Probably. I had made no secret of which side I had been with during the shooting. Did the dead men have friends downstairs? I doubted if anyone of them had ever had a real friend at any time in their lives. People with friends didn’t end up alone in the desert. But these guys were angry all the time anyway, so what was one more excuse to do something ugly?

  Then there was the storm. In another few hours, once the blizzard hit, no one would be going anywhere. Wherever you were when the winds hit, that’s where you would be for the next two or three days. Did I want to spend those days with those guys in this hotel? It took a microsecond to answer that one. I packed a bag and took the stairs two at a time as I made my exit.

  As I rushed down the street to Marc’s house, it occurred to me I had not seen him that morning. He might be back in his village. I would look pretty stupid freezing to death on some side street in DeSmet. Fortunately, he was there, and understood what I wanted the minute he saw the bag in my hand.

  “Come in. Good idea. It will be much more comfortable here than in the hotel, especially given what we have been planning.” Nicole was right there with him and it was clear she agreed as well. That was a relief. We talked for a little bit and they gave me an update on the storm. It would be big, and it would be here in two to three hours. Highways west of town were already closed down and more closings were on the way. Essentially the message to one and all was – wherever you are – stay there.

  The kitchen was nice and warm and we sat there while Marc made coffee. They had two teenage sons who poked their heads in briefly, decided I was less interesting than whatever videogame they were playing, and went back to their room. Meanwhile, I was interested in Marc’s plans.

  “Remember how we were going to cut the heat off to the village school?” he said. “We have been talking about using the same strategy here. If we cut off the heat to the hotel, they will leave it pretty fast.”

  “You wouldn’t do it now, would you? They would all be dead by morning.”

  “No, we need to give them an exit. We have to wait until the storm is over, and then give them plenty of reason to leave – once the roads are open again.”

  “They already have one reason to leave,” I said. “The beer is gone.” I then described what the hotel looked like this morning. “Maybe after two or three days in the same room with each other and no liquor, they will be ready to leave, heat or no heat.” We talked a bit more about what I had seen, and about Foster’s threat, but we g
radually settled in.

  No one was going to be leaving the house for at least two days. We tried to slow down and get used to the situation. There was the chance we would get on each other’s nerves just as easily as the angry-men would. The boys had videogames, and we had books. They also had the weather channel on the tv, so we could monitor just how bad this one would be. It wouldn’t be the worst of the decade, but it appeared it would be plenty bad. DeSmet was built with bad weather in mind, with utilities underground, so it was likely we would have lights and heat even if the wind got to the levels they were predicting. As long as that held true, we would ride it out. At least that was our hope.

  That first day went pretty well. It was even interesting to watch the storm build on various maps, with overlays of wind speeds and snow amounts while news along the bottom of the screen crawled along with closings of one kind or another. We watched the storm build all afternoon, and by evening, we were feeling it as the wind pushed at the house. I no longer had any objection to the plain brick of the walls or the small windows of the houses here. Both worked very well, although there was still the steady sound of snow crashing against the windows. This was not a gentle snow, these were ice crystals popping against the glass.

  At dinner time we spent a long time sitting and eating (well, the boys didn’t. They were to the table and gone again in under five minutes), and then we followed up with a DVD. They had a spare bedroom and Nicole made up a bed for me. I was pleased to get to bed. So far, things were going well.

  The next morning the wind was still up, and I think we first noticed the hum in the house. It was irritating. I suspect we had been hearing it all night, but it hadn’t registered until now. Nicole turned on a radio and let the music over-ride the hum. It was still there if you listened for it, but it was mostly covered. But it was still there -- a reminder that the wind was strong. On occasion there would be a gust that would cause the house to creak. It was a strong house, but the sound reminded you that the wind had power. It would be pushing on the house all day. It was easy to let your imagination get a little busy thinking about the wind taking out a door or window, or even a wall. We watched television, saw the endless crawl of cancellations, and sometimes stood by the windows watching the snow shoot sideways down the street like white bullets.

  That day we tried to keep up conversations, but there were quiet periods. Nicole kept the music going, and we spent much of the day in the kitchen cooking things from scratch, with me inventing a new dish – buffalo thermador. It tasted terrible, but it was fun to make and everyone was a good enough sport to at least eat some of it. But by evening the silences got longer, and the hum in the house seemed to get louder. I begged off and went to bed around 9, but I didn’t get to sleep until well past midnight.

  The third day of the storm we were all feeling the stress. It was like the air around the house wasn’t quiet, so we inside could not be quiet either. It made no sense. We were inside and warm and safe, but it felt stressful. Now when we watched the tv, it was not to see what was closed, it was to see if there was any improvement on the horizon. But it was clear there would be at least one more day of closed roads and dangerous winds.

  I think the boys saved us that day. They challenged us to some goofy game, where they had one controller, and we adults had another, and we tried to get through some weird land where plants ate you and trees gave you powers of some sort, and you needed to find a missing crown. It seemed endless and really stupid, but it was fun to have plants suddenly jump at you, or to get lost in a desert, and have weird characters pop up and talk. The boys had something like 45 crowns while we were still lost in the desert, but by working together, the three of us did finally manage to find one crown just before midnight. And that was the key. We got so caught up in the game we lost track of time. The day passed, and we barely noticed. Way to go boys.