Downtown Owl

by Chuck Klosterman

  Her future was a math problem.

  The woman on the radio cut off the end of “It’s Going to Take Some Time” to inform listeners that they should not be driving anywhere. “What is she yammering on about?” wondered Julia. “Look at the sky. It’s gorgeous. Look at the sky.”

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  3:14 P.M.

  (Horace)

  He shifted his pickup into reverse and made a three-point turn in the front yard. He drove down his driveway at fifteen miles per hour and turned right on County Road 17. It was two miles over gravel to the highway, and then it was one more mile to town. He shifted from first gear to second gear to third. He had made it a quarter mile from home; he could still see his house in the passenger-side mirror. He pushed in the clutch and the road disappeared. His vehicle was no longer moving in the direction the wheels were turning. He was sliding into the ditch. Drive it straight down, he thought. The ditch was steep. He did not want to roll it. He cranked the steering wheel all the way to the right and drove down the incline, blindly and directly. He was jostled about the cab, but not violently. He came to a stop at the bottom. He could not believe what the wind sounded like. It made all the windows shake. He could feel it through the glass.

  He could not open the driver’s-side door; the wind was forcing it shut. He slid across the bench seat and opened the other one. He poked out his head, squinted into the wind, saw nothing, felt terrified. He tried to slam the door shut, but the wind kept it open. He had to pull it with both hands. It closed, but just barely. He wasn’t sure if it latched.

  This was really bad.

  He peered at his fuel gauge. The tank was almost empty, so he turned off the engine. He reached under the seat and pulled out a green army blanket, an empty tin coffee can, a candle, wooden matches, a flashlight, and two Snickers bars from 1975. He placed the candle inside the can, lit it with a match, and aligned the can on the floorboards. He could feel the warmth immediately. Horace wrapped the blanket around his legs and waited for the storm to subside. “Important to be prepared,” he thought. “To a certain extent, I am prepared for this.” He tried not to look back at his fuel gauge, but he could not help himself.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  3:15 P.M.

  (Mitch)

  Everything was gone now. Everything was white and thick. Mitch was on his hands and knees and—for a moment—did not know why. He wondered if perhaps something had exploded inside his brain; perhaps he was having an aneurysm. But that notion did not last long. “This is snow,” he calmly concluded. “It’s blizzarding.” It was different from other blizzards he had experienced, certainly, and it was the first time he had ever been knocked to the ground by the movement of air. But it was still only snow. No cause for alarm. He turned his head toward Zebra to comment on the intensity of the wind. Zebra was no longer there, or at least he could not see him. He looked in the opposite direction and—again—saw nothing. He slowly stood up, bracing himself against a wind that did not seem possible. He looked in (what he believed to be) the direction of his car, but he saw nothing. He held his hand six inches in front of his face; he knew his hand was there, yet he could see not it. Whenever people try to describe especially intense blizzards, it’s common for them to say, “I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.” This, of course, is almost never true. This is an expression. But now he was looking at his hand, and it was literally in front of his face, and he could not see it.

  This was really something!

  Here was Mitch’s problem: The apple grove was not really a grove, per se; that was merely the nomenclature among the kids. The apple grove was just two parallel belts of apple trees, forty feet apart. If you were between the lines of trees, you were hidden from the adjacent county roads (and, by extension, the local cops who drove upon them), which was why teenagers went there to drink. However, it was open to the world at its north and south ends. As such, the apple grove was a wind tunnel. It was almost as if the trees had been planted by engineers from NASA, solely for the purposes of testing wind shear (and possibly for killing high school kids who had wanted to watch a fistfight).

  So this was the situation. The situation was this: Mitch had to get inside his car, or inside somebody else’s car, or inside anything that contained qualities of “insideness.” He knew he could not be more than seventy-five feet from where he’d parked his vehicle, although he suddenly found himself unsure how far (or near) seventy-five feet truly was. He tried to imagine two and a half first downs, but that didn’t help at all. Had Mitch been a confident person, he would have turned into the wind and walked thirty steps while veering slightly left, because that is where he imagined his car to be sitting (and where, in fact, it was). Had Mitch realized the true gravity of his circumstance, he might have crawled toward the east or the west and collected his wits among the apple trees, as they would have provided rudimentary shelter. But Mitch was not confident, and Mitch was not aware of what was happening. Instead he tried to follow (what he believed to be) the vague voices of his schoolmates, several of whom were screaming and freaking out. But the subzero wind had shifted their shrieks. It was carrying their voices to the south, so Mitch walked in a southbound direction. And since he was walking with the wind at his back, he was not as nervous as he should have been; the wind was excruciatingly cold, but physically reassuring. It pushed him along. It allowed him to walk faster. But he could not see where he was going and he could not tell how far he had gone, and he walked straight out of the opening at the south end of the grove, into a plowed field, away from everyone he knew.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  3:58 P.M.

  (Julia)

  I have struck the underpass, she thought. I have driven into a wall of concrete, and now I’m dead. They always claim you see white when you die, although normally in the form of light. Perhaps this is the afterlife. Is this possible?

  No.

  Julia had no idea what had just happened to her; it had happened faster than anything had ever happened to her before. She was driving, she glanced at the stereo, she looked back at the road, there was no road, and then she was flying through the air. Her Honda Civic had been picked six inches off the road and tossed like a baby thrown from a carriage. The landing was hard, then motionless. Her vehicle was still running, but the engine was whining like a wounded boar. She did not know if she had been thrown off the highway to her right (which would place her in a field) or if she had been thrown off the highway to her left (which would place her in the median). It was impossible to tell or remember. She released her seat belt and turned off the radio. She shook in place for two minutes, listening to wind that didn’t sound like wind.

  This was really terrifying.

  Julia pulled on her gloves and decided to walk toward the road, assuming she could deduce which direction that was. Her hands were still shaking, so it took a long time. She finally opened the door and tried to walk; the elements knocked her back inside. The cold was unrealistically palpable; it was like having salicylic acid thrown in her face. She pulled off her right glove and touched her left cheek. Her fear increased. There was no way her skin should feel that frozen, that fast.

  Remain calm, she thought. Get back in the car. Think calm thoughts. Think about friendly animals. Think about cows, chewing on cud and mooing.

  Stay in the car. That is the key. Stay in the car, no matter what. That is how people live.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  4:40 P.M.

  (Horace)

  This wasn’t the worst blizzard of all time. Horace knew that much. It couldn’t be. Absolutely not. Not even close. Who could ever forget the March blizzard of ’66? That lasted three days. The snowdrifts were as high as telephone poles. You could walk over the high wires. And even that was minor compared to 1888, when the so-called Children’s Blizzard killed five hundred people across the upper Midwest, most of them kids walking home from one-room schoolhouses. When viewed against the expanse of history, this storm was not so terrible. />
  But still.

  This wind!

  That was his concern: the wind. Its ferocity was extraterrestrial. It did not wax and wane. He kept trying to recall any other situation where he had felt (or heard) wind like this before, and he couldn’t remember a moment that was the least bit similar. Horace had lived his entire life in the windiest region of North America, yet he still possessed the capacity to be surprised by air.

  When he first lit the candle in the coffee can, Horace had been startled by how much warmth it immediately provided; now that the temperature in the cab had normalized, he was equally disillusioned by how impotent the flame seemed. He would need to run the heater, at least for a few minutes. Horace turned the ignition key forward, slid across the seat, and (again) opened the passenger door. He stepped out into the maelstrom and walked toward the back of the truck, guiding himself along the pickup’s box with his right hand. He had to make sure the exhaust pipe was not blocked by snow; this was a vitally important detail. If the pipe was clogged, he could die in his sleep. Seeing that the pipe was clean, he guided himself back inside the vehicle. This process should have taken thirty seconds, but it took four minutes. It was like walking on K2. When Horace finally reclosed the passenger door, he exhaled deeply, almost erotically. He wasn’t exhausted, but he felt like he was. He leaned forward and put his face in front of the heating vents. The warm air smelled like a fried cat.

  Against his will, Horace found himself glancing back at his fuel gauge compulsively, ten or eleven times a minute, stupidly hoping it would mysteriously indicate that his tank was full. “Idiot,” he thought to himself. “Never drive in winter with less than half a tank of fuel. Even a child knows that. Idiot.” He only allowed himself to run the heater for five minutes. He had to be judicious.

  There is no way the wind can blow like this all night, he thought. That was unthinkable. A wind this powerful could not sustain itself over time. Unless, of course, everything Horace had come to understand about wind was incorrect. And that was possible. Two hours ago, he had not believed a wind this intense could even exist. That being the case, how could he assume to know how long it could (or couldn’t) last?

  He thought about Harley’s Café and wondered if the other boys were trapped inside its walls, drinking coffee and talking about memorable storms of the past forty years. If they were, they’d undoubtedly assume Horace had been smart enough to stay at home; they would assume he’d heard about the Alberta Clipper on the TV and played things close to the vest. He had such awful, ironic luck. Everyone in Owl knew everything about everyone, but they couldn’t know that Horace was sitting in a ditch, looking at his gas gauge, listening to a wind he could not fathom, and dreaming about the dead wife and nonexistent children who were not wondering where he was.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  5:15 P.M.

  (Mitch)

  This is just like that story, he thought. It’s like that story we read two years ago in English about the man who walked the old Yukon trail. “It certainly was cold.” That was the line Mitch remembered most, along with the part about the man wanting to kill his dog in hopes of warming his hands inside its carcass. Mr. Laidlaw claimed the story was about mankind’s lack of humility and our unwillingness to respect the awesome power of nature. He also said it was about rejection of government, which is why people were walking the old Yukon trail in the first place. That same semester, they read “The Most Dangerous Game,” a story about Burmese tiger traps. It’s peculiar what you remember when you’re not trying.

  Jesus. It certainly was cold. How could it be this cold? Girls had been wearing T-shirts today. They had been wearing T-shirts outside. What happened? What made this happen? Just like in the story, Mitch spit to see if he could hear his saliva crackle in midair, freezing before it hit the ground. He heard nothing. He saw nothing. He could not even see his own spit, much less hear it crackle. It had been two hours since he had seen any color except white. For a while, he tried to turn 180 degrees and walk back to where he had come from, but he kept overcompensating; he kept turning 270 degrees and drifting farther to the east. After four attempts, he started to realize that every move he made was making things worse.

  You know, I might die today, he thought.

  But then he changed his mind.

  “I am still cold,” he told himself. “As long as I am cold, I am alive.” Everybody knew this. Everyone knew that as long as you can feel the cold, it’s not killing you. The time to start worrying is when you start to feel warm. “Walk straight.” He wasn’t saying these things aloud, but he could hear them inside his skull. “If you walk in a straight line, you will eventually hit something. You will hit a farmhouse, or you will hit a car, or you will hit a grain bin. Everything ends somewhere. You do not have to see the end in order to know that it is there.” He was surprised that he spoke to himself in platitudes during this type of situation, but maybe these types of situations were why platitudes existed. “You want to be a quarterback. Well, be a quarterback. Be a leader. Lead yourself. If you can’t lead yourself, you can’t expect anyone else to follow.” This, of course, was bullshit: Walking through a blizzard had no relationship to playing football, and 90 percent of Mitch’s brain understood that completely. He was reflexively echoing the irrational sentiments of a man he hated. What the fuck did leadership even mean? Wasn’t it simply a word people used to reconcile any kind of charisma that was impossible to otherwise explain?

  Probably.

  But right now, within the arctic blankness of his circumstance, that intellectual reality did not matter. In fact, it was an anchor. Which is why the core of Mitch’s brain—the 10 percent that had made him realize the likelihood of his own death—demanded that he ignore what he knew to be true in order to embrace what he had been told by others. It was the only way.

  “Walk straight. Prove you want to live. Come on, Vanna. Vanna! Are you sleepy, Vanna? Are you freezing to death? Are you snow-blind and confused and desperate? Maybe you want to die, Vanna. Maybe you think dying would be fun. Maybe you don’t care. Come on, Vanna. Vanna! Prove you want to live.”

  He said these things to himself, and he believed them. He was a warrior.

  But he was walking toward nothing.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  7:02 P.M.

  (Julia)

  For a while, the little stoner girl from Wisconsin regretted her decision not to buy any magazines when she was back at Pamida. It would have been nice to look at words and pictures; it would have made her less anxious. But now it was dark. Her regret became meaningless. She drank two warm cans of Tab and opened a box of Dolly Madison Zingers she’d impulsively purchased upon noticing they were only ninety-nine cents. Considering her present situation, that had been a brilliant move: There was nothing to do now except sit in the dark eating spongy fingers of yellow cake while listening to DJs on the radio explain how apocalyptic the current meteorological conditions apparently were. The fiberglass of her Japanese two-seater shuddered with every gust. She could not turn up the radio loud enough to block out the wind, even when she switched over to Q-98 and found some AC/DC.

  Her suffocating fear was now entirely gone; it had been replaced by boredom, and by the expectation of greater boredom in the near future. Now that night had fallen, Julia knew no one would be coming to rescue her until daybreak, unless the storm stopped completely and the highway department released the plows. She would have to wait. It would be a long night. Still, things could be worse: At least she drove a Honda. Julia didn’t know much about cars (including her own), but she knew at least one thing: She knew that Hondas got incredible gas mileage.

  Everybody always noted that, including her mechanic. Her engine could easily idle all night. She wouldn’t freeze. She’d just have to sit and do nothing for nine hours, which (actually) wasn’t that different from her job.

  At worst, this entrapment would give her something to talk about with Naomi and Ted, and maybe even with Vance. Maybe Vance would find her blizza
rd anecdote amusing and meaningful. “What did you spend your time thinking about?” he might ask. And perhaps that would be a leading question, solely posed to deduce whether she had been thinking about him. But Julia would (of course) be too coy for such obviousness, instead responding with something along the lines of “Oh, I mostly just thought about art.” To which Vance would say, “Art? I question that.” To which Julia would say, “Oh, there is a lot about me you don’t know, Mister Druid.” Their flirting would be hardcore. As their dialogue grew deeper, she would admit that she had been very scared for the first hour or so, and she’d paint a chilling verbal portrait of the storm’s ferocity. Her description would be so emotive that Vance would immediately feel closer to her, which would prompt him to tell Julia about a situation where he had been scared. Maybe it would be a story about something that had happened to him during kindergarten; maybe a dog had chased him up a tree and trapped him there for hours, and—years later—he can still recall that paralyzing fear whenever he sees a German shepherd or notices a child sitting inside a tree house. He would tell this anecdote in a humorous and self-deprecating manner, but it would elucidate many of his deeper qualities and motives. Moreover, Vance would fully realize that his (seemingly innocuous) story completely explained who he really was and how he viewed the world, which is why he’d specifically choose to tell it to Julia in the middle of a casual exchange that would not be remotely casual.