Evan adjusted his hat and sucked on his cigarette one last time before throwing it to the ground. It was his turn to hug and welcome the boys home. Comforting them was also an attempt to alleviate his own anxiety.
“We’re glad you made it,” he said. Kevin and Nick were younger than Evan and taller. They had that rangy thin build of young men who have not quite finished growing. Their almond-shaped eyes still held a youthful innocence, but they also betrayed a hardened desire to survive. “You guys should probably go home and see your parents. But don’t make a big scene or nothing like that. Just try to go home quietly. Maybe park those sleds behind the store, and we’ll give you rides home.” Kevin and Nick nodded in agreement. So did Isaiah and Tyler. “Don’t tell anyone yet about what’s going on down there. We should probably talk to Terry and the council about it first. People around here are already panicking.”
“Really?” asked Nick. “How bad is it?”
“The power’s been out here too. And everybody bought up everything in the store.” Evan gestured with his head towards the trading post.
“Fuuuuuuck,” said Kevin. He turned and ran his palm down his brown face to wipe away his tears and sweat.
“Don’t worry about that, though,” said Evan. “We’re fine here. We got things under control. But we need everyone on the same page. So go home, let your families know you’re here, and I’ll go get Terry and everyone else together. Let’s meet at the band office later this afternoon whenever you’re ready. We’ll wait for you there.”
Kevin and Nick agreed and untied the hockey bags and gas cans from the carts and threw them in the back of the pickup trucks. They got back on the snowmobiles and drove them behind the store.
Kevin got in the truck with his brother, and Nick got in with Isaiah. Evan sat alone in his truck as he watched them peel out. He turned the key and waited for the initial rumble of the diesel engine to settle into a steady hum, then leaned his head on the window, staring at his friends’ trucks as they dwindled into the distance.
Thirteen
The grey haze of the sage smoke hovered over the boardroom. The medicine continued to burn in the abalone shell on another table in the corner, pumping the healing aroma into the air. A chill remained in the room, but the temperature was steadily rising in this corner of the band office. Evan had flipped the breaker for this part of the building hours earlier and now he stood with his back against the far wall, the sleeves of his grey sweatshirt pushed up to his elbows. He watched as the others in the room milled about, reluctant to take their seats.
The long oak table was surrounded by twenty black leather chairs. The band council and senior staff held their executive meetings here, and it was always where they hosted visiting dignitaries and potential business partners — a government official coming to tour the results of a funding announcement, or a corporation looking to invest in resource extraction. But this informal gathering was unusually silent. The sun outside began to set, bouncing pink radiance off the snow and into the room.
Evan had briefed Terry and Walter. Kevin had told Tyler and their mother, Joanne, more at home. Nick had confided in his older sister Amanda, one of the councillors, and his parents. All of them were here, along with the four remaining council members and Isaiah.
Eventually, the leadership took their seats on one side of the table, while Kevin and Nick sat together on the other side with their parents. They wore nearly matching wool sweaters in slightly different shades of blue.
Terry cleared his throat. “Alright, we know why we’re here.” His bright red snowmobile jacket was undone to reveal a denim shirt underneath. The band councillors sat to either side of him, and Evan and Isaiah remained standing. “I just want to say we’re really happy you boys made it home. We want you to know you’re safe here.” He looked down at the table and sighed. “It looks like it’s a lot worse than we thought. I know it’s gonna be hard for you to talk about this, so take your time, but we need to know what you’re able to tell us. Just share what you feel comfortable sharing.”
Nick and Kevin looked at each other. They were both nineteen years old, barely men. They had grown up in families that believed in teaching their kids how to live on the land and they knew how to hunt, fish, and trap. They knew the basics of winter survival. Those experiences had hardened their bodies and helped them mature, but they looked at each other now, fragile as small children. All that training could not have prepared them for what had happened.
Nick brushed his straight black hair out of his eyes. Kevin looked to his friend and scratched the back of his head. “Okay, I’ll start. I guess about a week and a half ago — I’m actually not even sure how long it was now — there was a blackout,” he began. He looked down at the table, not making eye contact with anyone in the room. “I was in the welding shop at school, and it all went dark. It’s in the basement of the main building and doesn’t have any windows, just a big garage door that leads to a ramp outside. We waited around a bit for the lights to come back on, but then our teacher dismissed the class. So I walked across campus back to the residence, and there were a few other students waiting outside. Our keycards weren’t working but security eventually let us in.”
All eyes were on Kevin.
“The power came back on a couple hours later, but when I woke up in the morning, it was off again. I tried to use my cellphone but it wasn’t getting any service. So I went down the hall to check on this guy.” He motioned to Nick. “No one in the building really knew what was going on. We knew classes would be cancelled. We didn’t go anywhere that day.
“The next day there was still no power, and no phone service. Some of the other kids in the residence started freaking out because nobody knew what was going on. The floor supervisors tried to calm everyone down, but they didn’t really know what was happening either. So me and Nick left the building to see if we could find out anything.”
“I think we were getting a little stir-crazy,” interjected Nick. “You can’t keep us Nishinaabs cooped up all day!”
Everyone laughed in a mild murmur, and Kevin continued. “The cops were at most of the big intersections, directing traffic. We asked one when the power would be back on but he didn’t know. So we kept walking downtown. There were big lineups of cars and trucks at this one gas station we passed. But the pumps weren’t working without the power. People were getting real mad and yelling at each other and the people working there. It was kinda ugly.
“There were also lots of cars in the parking lot of the grocery store, but it was closed. Some people were banging on the windows. The cops were there too, trying to get people to go home and wait until power came back on.”
“We thought it was kinda funny,” added Nick. “The blackout was only two days, but it seemed like some people were already freaking out a little bit. I was just like, ‘Come to the rez, this shit happens all the time!’”
“We didn’t feel like sticking around to see what would happen, so we went back to the residence,” Kevin said. “When we got back there, we couldn’t get in, and the security guys seemed pretty uptight about everything. When they finally let us in, we saw dozens of people sitting in the cafeteria, waiting for something. We found out it was an emergency assembly. We sat down at a table with mostly white kids. No one had been able to take showers or nothing. Everyone looked pretty bush.” Kevin chuckled again. “They had sandwiches and apples and juice and that kinda stuff for us. Then someone from the college stood up and told us there was a blackout and asked us to be patient and to stay in the residence. He said the networks were down too. Some kids started getting angry, yelling that they wanted a shower or hot food. There were some security guards at the front and they sorta stepped forward to try to calm everyone down. We thought it was all pretty dumb, so we just went back to our rooms.”
The more the young men opened up, the looser the others in the room became as they reconnected with them. Terry leaned b
ack in his chair. Walter uncrossed his arms. Evan and Isaiah moved away from the wall and joined everyone else at the table. The sage had burned out but its smell lingered. It was getting dark outside.
“The next two days were more of the same,” Kevin went on. “We waited in our rooms. We went down to the cafeteria for sandwiches. Every time, we pocketed an extra sandwich to save for later, just in case. We didn’t want to go outside because we were worried that we wouldn’t get back in. We even read books!”
“I never read so much in my life,” said Nick.
“There weren’t any more assemblies or updates, though,” said Kevin. “Once in a while, our floor supervisor, Lance, would come by and check in on us, or tell us that someone was working on the problem. And then he stopped coming. They kept feeding us sandwiches in the caf so there was still some staff around, probably because they were hungry too. But the fruit ran out. So did the juice and milk. It was just meat on white bread. By then, it was pretty obvious that whatever was happening was really serious. So me and Nick decided to go back outside and check out what was happening.
“We had to make the security guy at the front desk promise to let us back in. But he was on edge too. He was a big white guy, looked like a football player, but his face was real pale and his eyes were bloodshot. He had a big winter coat on because it was really cold in the building by that point. It looked like he wasn’t all there. I felt bad for him.
“Outside there was no one around. It looked like the campus was dead. Out on the street, the cops were gone from the intersection. There were hardly any cars out there too.” Kevin paused to reach for the water bottle on the table in front of him. He twisted the cap, and the cracking of the seal was Nick’s cue to pick up the story.
“It was pretty spooky,” said Nick. “We heard voices from near the grocery store. We saw a whole bunch of people out front — like, hundreds. They were yelling and banging on the front door. We stopped to watch, making sure we didn’t get too close.
“Then out of the blue someone threw a big rock through one of the front windows. It smashed and glass went everywhere. One guy ran up through the crowd and just heaved a garbage can right through the big window.” He took a deep breath and cracked open his own water bottle, and Kevin picked the story up again. Beside him, Joanne stared at her son, her eyes fixed with worry.
“The crowd rushed into the grocery store, elbowing and shoving others out of the way. It looked like some people were getting cut on the glass because there was blood everywhere all of a sudden. Some of them were getting in fights and punching each other. We decided to get out of there.
“We ran all the way back to the residence. We decided not to tell anyone what we’d seen because we didn’t want to freak them out any more than they already were. We went back to my room, and that’s when we started to figure out how to get back here.”
“There was a big storm later that day too,” said Nick. “We knew we had to get our shit together pretty quick.”
Evan looked up at the ceiling and tried to align his own memories of the recent weeks with what he was hearing. He admired their bravery and ability to make it back home. Not long ago, he’d considered them just typical teenage boys.
Kevin and Nick explained their plan to leave the mayhem in the city. Finding their way out of town and heading north was easy, they said. Both had a fairly accurate idea of the way home. And if they did get lost, they’d just try to find the hydro line and take the service road. But securing snowmobiles would be hard.
They knew where the dealerships were. Most people who owned a snowmobile on the rez had bought it from a place in Gibson. They would be locked and shuttered, maybe even abandoned by now. Floor models wouldn’t do them any good anyway. They’d have to find machines that were already in use, hopefully with some gas in their tanks, since the pumps were out of service everywhere.
They’d have to siphon whatever was left in the vehicles they could find. They also needed cans to hold the gas. “The more we thought about this plan,” Kevin said, “the more frustrated we got. But the people who were still left in our building were literally going crazy. Some were crying all night. Some were fighting. We had to get outta there.”
They decided to pack their bags with as many clothes as possible. They put their essentials in the hockey bags and stashed the sandwiches they’d been saving deep within sweaters and jeans. The bread was growing stale but the meat was holding up because their rooms were so cold. It was the only food they’d have.
“Over the next couple of days, things got worse,” said Kevin. “We were left on our own in the residence. No one from the college came by anymore. All the bottled water they left us ran out. There was no food anywhere. We sort of kept to ourselves and didn’t really talk to anyone. Nobody had really talked to us much in the first place before this all happened anyway. There were fewer kids in the hallways every day. I dunno if they left town, or if something bad happened to them. But we couldn’t wait around and worry.
“Security was gone. The front door’s lock was broken. Anyone could come and go. I was worried there would be desperate and hungry people coming in, looking for food or shelter or anything. It was freezing. So we left our bags in our room and went to try to figure out our shit. We hid little emergency flashlights in our pockets.”
Nick said they went into the campus buildings to explore. The doors were smashed open and small groups of people huddled in the corners of the foyer and in rooms off the large hallway, trying to stay warm. “They were begging us for food,” his voice broke as he remembered. “Some of them looked real sick. It must have been about a week since the blackout started by that point. We couldn’t help them.”
“I told Nick we should go down to the shop wing. No one goes down there unless they have class. I thought we might be able to get some tools and stuff. And that’s when I remembered that’s where all the maintenance vehicles were kept. I thought there might even be something in the shops we could use. So we started running a bit. We looked around to make sure no one was following us. We turned down the wing, trying all the doors and they were all locked.
“We stopped in front of the door of the small-engine shop and waited a couple minutes, to make sure no one was behind us. And then I kicked it open.”
“We turned on our flashlights, and I couldn’t believe it,” added Kevin. “It looked like no one had been in there since the power went out. Either the teacher forgot about it or just didn’t care. But there were two snowmobiles in the middle of the shop. They looked pretty new, and they weren’t in pieces, waiting to get fixed. I went to the hall to keep six, while Nick tried them out.”
The keys were still in the ignition. Nick turned one and pulled the cord to start it. The engine revved to life. He killed it immediately, and they waited a long time before trying the other one, not wanting to attract attention. The second machine worked. Then they waited, again. Neither knew how much time they allowed to pass in the shop, but they didn’t want to risk being heard or spotted, especially since they may have found their way out of the city.
Nick told them that a final scan of the shop yielded four full Jerry cans of gas in a back corner. “We didn’t know if it was still any good,” said Kevin, “but it was a good sign, anyways.”
They left quietly through a back entrance to avoid the needy students.
“The snow was pretty deep by then,” he said. “We propped the door open with a screwdriver we pocketed from the shop. We walked all the way back around to the front, tight to the side of the building, so that we wouldn’t leave any footprints in the snow.”
Nick squeezed his empty water bottle, crunching the plastic. When they got back to the residence building, they heard a commotion in the cafeteria as hungry students tore through the kitchen. They made for the stairs and went up to Kevin’s room, where they waited out the daylight. They’d been sleeping in the same room for days by that point.
In the middle of the night they heard screams. A woman was shouting something neither of them could make out. They did their best to ignore the havoc, even as fists pounded on the door of the room where they hid. “We didn’t make any noise,” Kevin spoke softly. “We hoped they would think our room was empty.” Even in the darkness, they were paranoid about the others seeing their packed bags or any other hints of their impending escape. They didn’t sleep.
After what seemed like hours, they opened the door and cautiously carried nearly full hockey bags of clothes, food, and supplies downstairs and out the side door. They were still unsure of how they’d transport their gear with the snowmobiles, but they figured it was safer to stash their gear by the machines now, instead of scrambling for sleds or other towing implements in the heat of escape with big hockey bags on their backs.
They slipped through the frigid early morning, a half moon lighting their way. “We moved quick because of that,” he added. They took the same route back and were relieved to find the door still propped open. They said they ditched their hockey bags, closed the door, and made their way back to Kevin’s room. Everything was as silent as when they’d left.
“We slept for a couple hours, I guess, and then got woken up by voices outside in the hall,” said Nick.
“That’s when shit really started to get crazy.” Kevin picked up the story again. “I opened the door and a whole bunch of people were crowded at the end of the hall. They were looking in one guy’s room. His name was Dylan. I guess he got sick and died. Someone said he was diabetic. Someone else said he mighta OD’d. No one knew what happened to him.
Moon of the Crusted Snow Page 7
