by J. D. Palmer
I used to know where his mind went. Now I wonder if it’s trapped in the future. Or in one of the places we’ve been.
The wind rages outside, a howl that rises and falls but never abates. As if there were more than one wind out there, each vying with each other to see who can rock our vehicle the most.
“People really like to live up here?” Theo asks again from somewhere in the deep cavern of scarves and hats.
“The rest of the year is… nice,” Harlan says. He turns to look at Theo, the attempt of a smile on his face. “Winter keeps the riffraff and idiots out.”
I hear the soft chortle of Theo’s laugh and am glad. I know it’s forced. I know he, like everyone else, is worried. But he’s trying to follow Harlan’s lead. Trusting that we’ll get out of this.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that is new to this kind of winter. My only time with snow had been at a ski resort, back when we had Doppler radar to tell us what weather to expect. Back when roads were maintained and there was electricity to keep us warm. Seeing snow back then was akin to seeing a tiger in a zoo.
So this is what it’s like in the wild.
“The eggplant is another thing I’d like to rename,” Josey suddenly says from the back. It brings a smile to my face, this game of his. “Whoever named the grapefruit must have also named the eggplant. They must have been out of ideas.”
“So what the fuck are you gonna call it?” Sheila says, and I know Josey always waits for someone to ask just that. The showman who knows his audience.
“I think I’ll call it ‘purple cucumber.’”
Sheila snorts. “You can do better than that.”
“I’m willing to take suggestions.”
For awhile we debate different names, each of us proffering one and then voting. ‘Tuberdick’ somehow carries the day, and we all laugh the laugh of people of who are avoiding the problem outside.
Pike starts to whimper in his sleep, body spasming as he chases something in his dreams. I lean over and rest my head on his belly, enjoying the rise and fall of his breathing. Harlan has made me able to touch. To accept touches. To be held by him when I sleep at night. To Theo or Josey putting an arm around me or tapping me on the shoulder. Sheila swatting my butt and telling me to move over. But Pike is helping me take it to a new level. To the level where I can… be myself. To grab or hold or pinch or shove as one would. To find that area of physicality somewhere in between soft touches and violence.
HARLAN | 22
THERE ISN’T MUCH talk as the night settles in. Theo snores but we’re all pretty used to it now and I think most of us sleep. I have learned to recognize the soft exhales of Beryl, the little whimpers of Sheila, as they sleep. Josey’s loud sighs, as if every breath is the first breath after being stuck under water. I wonder what I do.
I wake up frigid. My nose is freezing and my feet feel like lumps of ice on the floor. Dim light seeps in through windows covered with snow. At least we made it through the night.
My head throbs. We need fresh air. My eyes feel swollen and my limbs distant, weak. I try to open my door, fumbling with the handle. It doesn’t give. I throw my shoulder into it, a crack as the plastic paneling breaks free from the ice. The cold outside is no different from the cold inside the car. But the wind, so small, makes it feel ten times worse. At least it’s clean. I can feel my head slowly clearing as the others mumble complaints from the back.
I try to start the car thinking to turn on the heat. To warm it up and drive it away on roads swept clear by snow plows.
The fact that it won’t even turn over jolts me back to reality. The haze in my brain clearing as I remember where we are, and just how bad being stuck here is.
Don’t forget who brought us here.
“It’s stopped… snowing.” Beryl gives me a wan smile, trying to be upbeat even if her eyes don’t mean it.
I nod, settling back into my seat as the fresh air starts to circulate. “For now.”
The seat isn’t warm but it was my home for the night, and I return to my hunched-over position, a poor, instinctual attempt to bring all the heat I can muster to my core. My head is bowed into my chest. It’s easy to find myself slipping back into somewhere close to sleep again as the pain in my head abates and depression lays its heavy hand on my shoulders.
Memories flicker through me, bleeding from one into another so that past and present run together. My friends and I gather in a circle, waiting for the bus to go to school, huddled together because it’s freezing out, and also, well, you don’t go to school in eighth grade dressed as thickly as you did when you were younger. Not if you want to be cool. Our breath plumes and teeth chatter and we make fun of each other.
“You remember that?” I laugh. “Bus driver turned us in for smoking.”
“Har?” A hand grabs my shoulder, jostles me awake. “You okay, man?” Josey asks.
I feel foggy still. A shadow of myself, unfocused and unsure. My eyes are gritty, swollen, and my lips are so chapped and my tongue so dry that it takes me a minute of coughing and summoning spit just to be able to speak.
“I’m fine.”
I turn around to look at the others.
“One of you wake Theo up? We need to get going soon.”
I say the words, but I’m as slow as the others to finally make my way outside. We are all tired, and sore, and mentally sluggish from our night in the car.
“Stomp. Stomp your feet.”
We mill around, trying to get our brains and extremities to wake up. I kick the tires of the car until it starts to hurt. I’d rather stare at the ground than look at the worried, or worse, angry faces of my friends.
We cut holes in the blankets to make rough ponchos and drink the rest of our thawed water. Five small, frozen bottles from the back are stashed on bodies to melt. After that, I don’t know. We’ll refill the bottles with snow, I guess.
It’s hard to leave the car. Even if it’s useless, part of me is afraid to strike out into the unknown landscape. The car is at least shelter, a place to wait. For what? I keep putting the moment off. Five more minutes. Five more… Five more.
“You guys ready?” I don’t look around to see. I’m afraid they’ll shake their heads.
It’s a white wasteland. Two feet of snow coats the land around us, caved and marbled in drifts and valleys by the angry wind. A fence runs along either side of the freeway and the snow has mounded along the tops of posts and along the barbed wire. The road stretches out ahead of us, barely discernible but for the shallow drop-off of the embankments on either side.
There’s not much to say. We know there is nothing behind us. We can’t take off across snowy acres in the off-chance of finding a farmhouse. We move forward on the only path open to us, the road.
It’s not fun.
Our feet were already frozen from the night spent in the car. Now mine feel damp, snow finding its way inside my boots. Our legs get coated with snow from plowing through drifts we can’t avoid. Those of us unfortunate enough to be sporting shoe laces are soon hampered by icy balls that bounce with our steps. At first we walk in a loose group, but soon we fall into a line, stepping into the footprints of the person in front of us. Pike forges through snow that’s sometimes up to his chest, occasionally snapping up bits of snow as if he could chastise it for being such an encumbrance.
My headache has returned in full force. The sky is a dull grey, the sun unable to break through, but the glare off of the snow is still harsh. I curse myself for not having a pair of sunglasses.
There is little to no wind, but the air is cold and sharp as a knife blade. We breathe through scarves and sometimes put gloves over our mouths. The snot in my nose is frozen.
What a lovely day.
I stay in the front and do my best to keep my knees powering forward through the crusted snow. More and more I stop to scan the horizon just to give my legs a rest. I walk to the edge of the road and trip over the guardrail, almost toppling over. Josey doesn’t make jokes and Sheila do
esn’t cuss me out. A bad sign.
We walk for a couple hours, barely talking, before I see the third mile marker peeking out of the snow. Three miles.
I cover my face. Inhale and exhale. Just a moment. Then I slog ahead, a short-lived attempt to speed myself up. To try to burn off the frustration rather than expel it in a scream. I want to lower my head and yell “Fuck!”
But that would do nothing but create more doubt, more fear. I remember the first time my mom sat me down and talked to me about cursing. It was my final year in middle school, and “fuck” had become an all too familiar word around the house. At least out of my mouth.
“Harlan, I don’t mind that you swear. But you need to know something about it.”
“Yeah.”
“The more you swear, the less power the word has.”
“Huh?”
She looked at me with that look only mothers can give. Part disappointment, part humor. “You wait for someone to swear around you that has never said fuck before, you’ll see.”
And I got it. I totally understood. I saw my mom swear for the first time when she showed up at the hospital to find my father dead.
Power, my mom had said. Power to sway, to influence. Power to discourage, too. I would have let loose a stream of vitriol a year ago, that’s something I know for sure. I fucking know it.
A leader can’t do that, so I keep it inside.
This time.
Beryl senses my frustration, but hopefully I’m not robbing the others of hope as we slog, and crawl, and stumble our way across a white, blank page of land.
Another hour later and I almost miss it. Too frustrated with the whiteness. The never ceasing sameness to the landscape beyond small hills and small twists in the road. My head throbs and my eyes hurt. But there…
Tracks.
The unblemished landscape is marred by holes followed by strange lines. No animal could make tracks like that. I hold my hand up but Beryl still runs into me. She must have been looking at the ground.
“What?” Sheila snaps at me. Then she notices the tracks and has enough grace to look slightly sheepish. The prints angle down from a hill, a flurry of steps as they maneuver beneath the fence, before continuing on.
Something is nearby.
The tracks run parallel to the road for a bit before crossing further down. We stand in a small circle, the sweat on our backs cooling, causing shivers as we stand, hunched together, as if admiring a piece of art. Which I guess it is, a pencil line across an otherwise untouched canvas that could mean the difference between life or death for us.
A gun cocks. I turn to see Beryl sliding her hand up into her coat. She nods to me.
“You want to follow them?” Josey breaks the silence.
I nod. “Don’t think we have much of a choice.”
He nods along, but he’s nervous about something. “When we catch up to them, how are we gonna do it?”
The question joins the cold in the air, invisible but felt to the bones.
“Whatever it takes,” I say softly, and he nods. He takes off his pack and unstraps his shotgun, cursing the cold as he takes off his gloves to load it. The rest also make ready, a sad preparation for violence.
We set off after the tracks, and I enjoy putting my feet in someone else’s struggles for awhile. I set a quick pace. Who knows how old these tracks are? And we have to catch them before nightfall. Or another storm.
The feet are smaller than mine, the strides shorter. A woman? A child? I pat the gun at my side, reminding myself not to trust too easily.
We hustle through the next twenty minutes before catching sight of our prey. Our prey? The person is bundled up in a huge purple gaberdine coat, blond hair peeking out from beneath a woolen hat. A woman. She is walking towards us, returning from whatever journey she had been on. Behind her she pulls a sled, lightly loaded with small boxes covered with a tarp. She walks with her head down and doesn’t see us. We freeze, spreading out across the road, not in any attempt to be menacing, but simply so that we can all see her. She trudges forward, no sound but the crunch of her boots and the hiss of the sled behind her. I think she is muttering to herself, but I can’t be sure.
She backtracks through her footprints towards a semicircle of cold and scared people without any idea of what she is walking into. No one says anything on my side, and I belatedly realize that they are waiting for me to do something. I can feel Sheila’s disdain. Mickey would know what to do. Mickey would have already announced himself and made this woman feel at ease.
“Don’t be frightened.”
Good one.
The woman jerks her head up and stumbles backwards into her sled, awkwardly falling on top of the boxes. She looks pissed for a second, only when she realizes that we are strangers does she begin to look scared. I take a step forward.
“We have been traveling. We are cold, and tired.”
She doesn’t respond and I take a deep breath. In her eyes this must be creepy, or strange, or both.
“If you have shelter I would ask that my friends and I might be able join you for awhile. In return we would… Earn our keep.”
Earn our keep? What do we have to offer?
The woman slowly pushes herself to her feet. She’s tall, close to my height. Hard to tell anything else about her with all those layers. Only that she is as cold as we are. She shoots looks back towards the hill and I can’t help but double-check behind us.
“I…”
She fights a war within herself. One I’ve become acquainted with. Do you trust? Or do you keep them away? I try to help and fucking fail.
“Look, I understand we might not look trustworthy. We have gone through some hardships.”
Behind me Sheila snorts. “Fuckin’ A Har.”
I ignore her.
“We don’t mean any harm. But we are cold, and we need shelter.”
She lifts a chin. “How is that my problem?”
A thick Norwegian accent speaks the words loudly and clearly, the vowels and consonants rising and dipping in sudden peaks as steep as the fjords of her homeland.
I try to give her a winning smile. “It’s not. I was just hoping you would find it in your heart to help us. We can’t go much farther.”
I try to say the last part without begging.
She scans the group. Kind eyes taking us in; hunched shoulders and ragged clothing. I hold my arms out wide. I don’t want to have to beg. I don’t want to have to pull out a gun and threaten her with violence, either. But I know we can’t just walk away from this.
Sheila steps forward. Dammit. “Look, bitch, we could just follow your tracks back to wherever you came from. We’re being fucking polite.”
We all cringe, including the girl. “I know. It’s just, there are a lot of men in your group. I can’t…” She trails off. Takes a second in which she looks at me. “I don’t know if I have a choice, do I?”
I don’t respond. Everyone here knows that if I say “yes,” I’d be lying. The silence lingers, deeper even than the hush a frozen landscape provides. She still stares at me. “Here,” I say, and reach into my coat for my gun. I feel Josey tense, but I keep my eyes on the woman. “You can have my gun. You can walk us in if you want.”
I hear a hiss of air between teeth, apparently Beryl doesn’t approve. The woman slowly steps forward and takes the proffered weapon. She holds it flat, cradled in her two palms, as if I’ve given her a book to read instead of a weapon. Or maybe she does see the stories it holds, because she hands it back to me after a moment.
“I would… it makes no difference.”
“Okay,” I say, relieved to have it back.
“You have to promise that you’ll not hurt anyone. And you’ll do everything Momma… You’ll do everything Karen says.”
“Within reason, yes.”
I’m too eager to get going. To get my people warm. To lie down and sleep away this headache.
“Are any of you pilots?” She asks, as if an afterthought, but I see th
e hope in her eyes as she waits for an answer.
We look around at each other, confused. Shake our heads no.
“Okay. Okay. My name is Jacqueline. Come with me.”
We trudge back the way we came on tired legs and Sheila mutters something about how we should have just sat and waited for her to walk back this way. In a way it’s good that she’s complaining again. Josey is making jokes, too. It means we’re going to be okay.
We duck under the fence and trudge up the hill. Jacqueline struggles near the top with the sled and I offer to take it. She agrees and I take hold of the rope. I pull, the cord going taut and my shoulders respond to the pull of gravity.
Hurry up.
For a second I’m not on a snowy hill, my snot frozen in my beard and my feet blocks of ice. For a second I’m pulling a wagon full of canned goods up a hill in California. Stuart trudges behind me, his awkward walk scuffing the pavement. My hand reaches for my neck to see if there is a collar and I almost let go of the sled.
For a second.
Beryl grabs my elbow and starts me walking and I pretend like nothing happened. My heart races in a chest that seems to be squeezing shut. The fear and distrust rises in me and starts to slow my steps. Do the others feel it? Maybe we should have our guns out and ready. This could be a trap. Or worse, they’ll simply shoot us on sight. I would.
It’s getting colder. My fingers are curled into fists inside my too-thin gloves. Muffled coughs come from the scarf that covers the entirety of Theo’s face. Beryl still has a hold of my elbow but now uses me for support, her steps frequently stumbling in the thick snow. If we are walking into a trap we won’t be putting up much of a fight.
White flakes begin to drift down around us as we walk over another hill and follow the gentle curve of a frozen stream. There is a line of trees across an open field and there, just discernible, a small plume of smoke. The low of a cow from somewhere beyond the leafless wall disrupts the silence and makes this whole tableau feel surrealistic, as if we have entered a foreign land, forgotten when the rest of the world was being ravaged.
