by J. D. Palmer
I curse our luck. I curse myself. I, out of anyone here, should know how capricious the weather is. Theo was driving and started to panic as the road went from black to grey to white.
We pull over and I take over driving, feigning more confidence navigating in this weather than what I truly feel. The car silent as gusts of wind nudge us this way and that. A cat playing with a mouse.
I try to pretend that we aren’t in trouble. But we are. I know the tiny dots on the map stand for places that aren’t big enough to be towns. And those are sixty miles apart. Welcome to Montana.
“Should we stop? Wait for it to stop snowing? We can’t see.”
I look back at Josey. “We stop, we won’t get started again.”
The headlights illuminate snow flecks that zip around outside of our car, a frozen wasp nest knocked from a tree. The wind howls and makes the silence in the car more ominous. The only thing I have going for me is that I have the whole road to myself. I push the car as fast as I can, waiting for the roar of the rumble strip to let me know when I am at the edge.
“Keep an eye out for a house.”
I have already said it at least three times now, and it’s not like they aren’t staring out the windows, desperation growing in their eyes.
I take off my gloves to better feel the road through the wheel. It’s getting colder. Fast. I crank up the defrost as the windshield turns into a diaphanous lens into the kingdom of Boreas.
“How much gas do we have?”
Beryl speaks calmly, her whispery speech made more ethereal by the ghostly vapor expelled from her mouth.
“Enough.” We aren’t going to make it.
Theo shifts in the back seat, and I watch him pull the hat farther down over his ears. “Why the fuck would you live here? Ain’t no wonder no brothers up north.”
I flash him a smile. “This ain’t shit. Been through much worse.” Should I have said that? “Guys, the weather here changes like that,” I snap my fingers, “ten minutes from now we could be driving in sunshine.”
I don’t believe it and I don’t think anyone else does either. Hands grip the sides of the car as we skid more and more, nervous heads leaning forward to check on the diminishing gas gauge.
“What are we going to do, you fucking shit, when we run out of gas?”
Sheila is getting scared and that means she is angrier than usual. Just what we need.
“We’ll be fine.”
She doesn’t let me brush it off. “Fuck you. Give us a plan.”
Can’t be mad at her for asking. I got us into this, I was just hoping I’d be able to get us out before things got dire.
“If we don’t find a place to hunker down we will be stuck in here until the storm ends. We’ll find a place in a lee so that the wind will keep the snow from drifting. And we’ll be cold.”
Sweet plan.
Sheila snorted. “We should probably all get naked too, right?”
I don’t know where she is going with that.
In the end we make it another half hour before the snow starts grabbing at our tires. Not for the first time I wish for my old truck. Drifts are piling up across the road, the wind erecting barriers for us to cross. I gun the Explorer to get through a deep hump and the back tires slid sideways. Everyone in the car tenses as we fishtail, and then we are spinning, helpless to do anything until we came to a stop.
We hit the guardrail hard enough that Josey smacks his head on the window. He curses, inhaling through gritted teeth and clutching his skull. I try to pull forward but the SUV just bucks and shakes as the wheels scrabble for purchase.
I try rocking it free; shifting from reverse, to forward, and back again. Just the angry scrabbling of tires spinning on ice.
We don’t budge.
I kill the engine. No sense wasting what little gas we have left. Silence but for our breathing and the howling of the storm outside.
“Fuck.”
Beryl rubs my shoulder and that only makes me feel worse. This is on my head. I had made it plain that no one had to come with me on my wild goose chase. But I had made it plain, too, that I wanted them along.
I get out of the car, eager to get outside before someone asks, “what do we do now?”
The snow is thick and deep, the fluff replaced by a muddy, icy sheen where we skidded. The front end just barely rests against the guardrail, the smallest of dents where we hit.
“Fuck.”
I hustle back to the car to grab my gloves, and hat. And maybe throw on a sweatshirt beneath my coat.
“We’re stuck bad?”
I almost snap at Josey for asking. I nod, knowing I’m just mad at myself. “We need to dig it out.”
“With what? We don’t have a shovel.”
Goddammit Harlan. I feel the disappointment of my parents. I should know better. I grew up here.
“We’ll use the hubcaps.”
We pile out, pulling on hats and gloves and coats. Pike hops out, only doing a cursory circle of the car before peeing, then requesting with a pointed nose to be let back inside. None of us blame him. Fuck, it’s cold. My nose is already numb, the icy bite of the wind stings my cheeks. The familiar feel of powder making it’s way into my boots as nostalgic as it is unwanted. Theo mutters a constant string of expletives as we scoop snow from the undercarriage and around the tires.
We take turns, and it doesn’t take us long to clear out a spot in front of the Explorer for people to push. It doesn’t take us long to clear the tires. It also doesn’t take long for new snow to start to replace it.
I open my door and grab the floor mat, gesturing to Beryl to give me the one from the passenger side as well. “Theo, Josey, you mind pushing?”
“Not all of us?” Sheila asks, and I can’t tell if she’s offended or relieved.
“Need as much weight as we can get in the back.”
“Then maybe Beryl and I should push.”
I ignore her and trudge around to the rear bumper, kneeling to position the mats behind the tires.
Theo and Josey stand watching me. “What’s with the mats?” Theo asks.
“We don’t have kitty litter.”
The two share a look, perhaps wondering if I’ve lost my mind.
“So the wheels can grab onto something. Hopefully. If you guys can push from the front, we’ll rock her back, get her going again.”
I climb into the car without waiting for a response, the cabin feeling almost cozy compared to the outside. I start it up, waving at the men outside to start pushing as I throw it into reverse. Rev, relax, rev, relax. The Explorer shudders and shakes, the engine growling, then growing to a roar and… we do nothing but slide a few inches to the side. I see the front of the car move up under the straining of Josey and Theo. But we don’t move backwards. The smell of smoke starts to fill the car.
I kill the engine and pound the steering wheel. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Josey and Theo climb back inside, breathing heavily. A new silence takes over. A defeated silence. The silence of people given time to imagine just how shitty the next hours will be for them.
“Now what?” Josey asks. As if he doesn’t already know.
“We’re stuck here for the night.”
“For the night?”
“Yeah.”
I pull my gloves back on. “I’ll grab some food and blankets from the back.” That they could have crawled over the seat is not lost on me. A sign of the mood. The slap of the icy wind is almost a nice reprieve.
I kick at the snow as I walk to the back hatch. I hate this feeling. Helplessness. Guilt. Anger. I remember this same sick knot in my gut after sliding off the road with my sister. I was going too fast for the conditions, as I was now, and we ended up spinning into a ditch. Half an hour of arguing over what to do. Half an hour before we even saw another vehicle.
A tow-truck pulled us out after an hour. He didn’t even charge us. “I already pulled out eight people,” the man said. “This is white gold.”
We w
ere so relieved. Neither of us wanted our mom to have to come get us, nor did I want her to know how reckless I had been driving.
But there will be no friendly savior to pull us out of here. There won’t be anyone coming by, not tonight, maybe not for a long, long time.
“Blankets and water. And protein bars. Keep the water someplace warm so it can’t freeze.”
Sheila doesn’t make a joke about her vagina. A bad sign.
We pass food around and try to get comfortable. Theo was already cramped, his large shoulders stuck in a permanent shrug, and it’s getting more and more claustrophobic with five people gobbling up the oxygen. Josey can’t stop fidgeting and I’m afraid that Sheila might stab him. This storm had better end quickly.
No one talks. I can’t tell if it’s anger with me or despair at our situation. I don’t want to tell them that we’ll be okay. I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to get stabbed either.
I feel the burden of companionship. Dammit but I’ve always wanted to be liked. To be accepted. Everyone does, right? But there were those days after I broke my leg in high school in which I retreated into myself. Got to know myself. And I’d let everyone fade away. Liberating, at least for one who had felt so much pressure to become something. Liberating in that you no longer lived and died on the opinions of others. But now I have something worth working to keep. A family of sorts. Or friends. And woe to them that live or die by the decisions of one such as me.
I start the car and blast warm heat, eye watching the dwindling gas gauge for the slightest movement. It’s quickly growing stale inside and it has more to do with temperament than bad air.
“My dad used to carry pebbles in his pockets.”
It’s the only thing I can think of to say. A truth, of some sort, at least to break the silence with something other than an apology.
“He’d pick up rocks that were shaped like hearts and bring them to my mom. He’d find cool rocks for my sister and me, and it was just something we expected when he got home from work. He’d show up with his thermos and lunch pail and hard hat… and a rock. And he never told us what to do with them so our rooms were littered with them. And once a month most of them would disappear. My mom, trying to keep a tidy house. But she knew which ones were important.”
No one has any choice but to listen. And I can’t tell if they’re interested or not, and I can’t find the courage to look in the rearview mirror and find out. But I’m tired of being quiet about the past. And I’m just fucking tired of the quiet. No, that’s wrong. I like the howl of the storm and the stillness inside. I’m tired of the anger and frustration in our group. I want to talk about good things.
“So we get older and I turn sixteen and I don’t go out and get drunk at some kegger with a bunch of seniors. Instead, since I don’t know what drunk is, I find my dad’s whiskey and get after it. And I wake up in my room and my dad is sitting there next to my bed holding a rock.”
I didn’t realize this story would hit me, but I need a second to continue. A second to pause and feel the melting snow drip down my spine and the howling wind give the car a sway.
“He’s sitting there, and I try to pretend that I’m cool and I thought, back then, that I had fooled him. And he holds out a pebble. And it’s plum colored, shaped like a UFO. He says, ‘I was skipping rocks when I met your mother. I almost threw this one.”
I can still see my dad, clean-shaven and so much larger than me.
“And I threw a teenage fit. I told him I didn’t know why he was in my room and what the fuck was up with the rocks he was giving us. You know what he said? He said that rocks are alive. He said that the earth makes rocks the same way that we store away memories. Something happens, big or small, and the earth would clench and breathe and there would be a mountain. Or a pebble. Rocks were the memories of the earth. And if you listened to what they had to say then they would listen to you.”
I sneak a glimpse at Beryl. “Pretty weird, right?”
She doesn’t say anything. Not that she would. Her eyes are her voice more than ever.
“And he always told us to take our stones with us. Keep them in our pockets and share the world with them. Share our fears and doubts and successes.”
I think back, a grim smile on my face. “He said that if we stay in touch with the land then the land will talk right back to us.”
I look outside at the howling wind sending streaks of white into slowly building drifts. I feel like a stranger here. Even though this is my home. The north has always been my home.
Silence greets my story. As it should. I don’t know what they are thinking. Perhaps embarrassed for me that I am turning maudlin in dire circumstances. Perhaps confused. Perhaps wondering if I have a stone in my pocket.
I don’t.
Maybe if I did I would have felt this storm coming. Is this how it was back in the days of yore? Was your whole life bent towards predicting the weather or a toothache? Simple things, but deadly all the same. A whole life scrambling to avoid death by weather or disease or bad luck and maybe, just maybe, finding one minute of love in between?
“What happened with you and your dad?”
Sheila is making eye contact with me in the rearview mirror.
“You talk about him in the past tense. But not the rest of your family.”
This is hard for me to talk about, but in a different way than before. Had I been asked that question before all of this I would have said the same thing I say now, only I would have done my best to impart the pain that came along with it. To make them feel sorry for me. To show how rough I’ve had it.
I know better now.
I don’t need to tell these people that it hurts. That it hurt, I guess. Now I just want to say this in the best words possible. My history is the only history, of this, now.
“His heart gave out. Years before all of this.”
I had kept the rock they found in my Dad’s pocket. For awhile. I chucked it into Flathead Lake in the midst of teenage angst and anger. But I still remember what it looked like. It was so plain, I never understood what made it special to my father. I wish I had asked him where it came from. What stories it had told.
Silence in the car.
I really know how to keep everyone upbeat.
A grunt from Sheila. “It’s good. He died. Before all of this. Means you have a good memory of him.”
I swivel around to look at her, confused.
“My dad lived. Might still be alive.” Sheila’s face is hard. Impassive. But as she looks out the window I can see how hard she is clenching her teeth. “He was a good father. Wanted a boy, but I made up for it. We’d play catch and watch football together. Taught me to be tough. Confident in what I do. Then this happens and he turns into a little bitch.”
I wince at the callous words. Hard words from a hard woman. And they make me wonder, if anyone I know is still alive in Montana, will they be the same?
You aren’t.
“What did he do?”
Beryl speaks so softly her words are almost lost in the howl of the wind. And for a minute I don’t think Sheila hears her. Then she swings her gaze up front and cocks her head.
“He was the CEO of a company. He wouldn’t leave the office. Made me bring food up to him. Some days he would be crying. Some days he’d be writing notes and compiling a history of the business as he saw it so that his place would be preserved should everything go back to normal. Then he started blaming people. Then he started blaming me.” She snorts. “He was fucking weak. Josey you’re gonna have to move, I need to piss.”
She awkwardly slithers over his lap and then everyone is shielding themselves from the icy blast as the door is opened. I wonder if she was as cold to her father as she was in the telling of the story. It’s hard to imagine Sheila any different.
I glance at Beryl, she’s staring out at the snow, eyes deep in thought. They are alike in some ways, her and Sheila. Both have been through a lot of pain. Loss. But where Sheila is all anger, a blunt weapon t
hat clubs you in the face… Beryl is a thin blade, made for precision. A stiletto that you won’t see until it’s too late.
She seems to feel my gaze and turns to look at me. A crooked smile and a hand that grabs mine. “I think it’s… good… for her to talk,” she says. And I nod, and squeeze her hand, and wonder if she knows how much her love cuts me to the core.
BERYL | 21
THE INSIDE OF a parked car. Not a place I knew I hated. Until I couldn’t get away.
I guess it’s just the feeling of being trapped.
Is my whole life going to be like this?
I wonder if any therapists survived the downfall. I think we could all use one. Though, glancing around, I don’t think there’s anyone here who would go voluntarily. Some pride, some stubbornness. But mostly because talking about these things would be too much. Words wouldn’t do the injustice justice. And that would demean it, I think.
But it helped me, and I know it helped Harlan, when I asked him to tell Theo the story of how we came to Camelot. Catharsis, if only an increment.
Pike squirms onto my lap, the blanket draped over him encapsulating the heat he puts off like a little oven. Because of him my belly is hot, damp with sweat, while my toes curl up in my boots to try to retain what little warmth they have. I rub his head and he stretches, then his head rolls up to look at me, distress in his eyes. A look I’ve come to know.
“He… did it again.”
Sheila punches the back of my seat. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I hear blankets and coats rustling as everyone moves to cover their face, the incredible stench of Pike’s flatulence quickly finding a way to every corner of the car.
Yes. Therapy will be required.
“The fuck are you feeding him?”
A stupid question, since we all know what he eats. He eats what we eat.
I don’t hear it, but Theo must be laughing, for Sheila leans across to jerk the scarf down from in front of his face. “You like this? You like being stuck in here… with this!?”
Harlan glances up and looks in the rearview mirror. As if he didn’t know what was going on. Only now his hand reaches up to cover his face and he gives Pike a disparaging look.
