by Jerry Ahern
Already, the highway was white and in the surviving west-coast mirror Frost could see the marks left by the car and trailer tires behind him—but there was no other traffic and what he could see of the sky through the swirling snow was dark gray—almost black in spots.
“Snow!”
He lit another cigarette, straightened up against his chair back a moment, then went back to riding the electric trailer-brake lever with his thumb. He thought how wonderful it would be if he crashed into something leaning forward as he was—he’d not only get killed, but break his face first.
Another hour passed—according to the radio— and now the severe weather bulletins were coming every few minutes, between every song. Fourteen inches of snow were predicted with subfreezing temperatures, hazardous driving conditions, and high winds with blowing and drifting snow. Frost’s knuckles were white against the blue steering wheel; his hands shifted the wheel right and left, right and left, searching for traction. The rain that had fallen had frozen under the snow and then started to melt, he presumed, the snow serving to insulate it against the cold. Now, the just-freezing-temperature rain under the snow had converted the highway to polished glass. The wind where it had blown snow off the highway revealed shining patches of slick ice. The car was skidding slightly and Frost worked the trailer brake again, getting the skid under control. There was still no other traffic on the highway and the snow was falling so fast and so heavily that when he looked in the one clear patch on the west-coast mirror, all he could see was a faint outline where his tracks should have been.
“Do you want to pull over?”
“Yeah—I think I’m going to have—” Frost cut the steering wheel hard right, into the direction of the skid, uncertain if, with the trailer, that was the right thing—should he have pulled it left? He worked the trailer brake, but the car wasn’t slowing. He could see the shoulder coming up to him, laterally, the interior of the car. The world around him seemed to have suddenly switched into slow motion. “Get down in front of the seat!” He cut the wheel into the skid and now the car was jackknifing against the trailer. In the rear-view mirror where the defogger had melted away the snow, Frost could see the trailer swinging wildly. He cut the wheel right, then left, then hard left. The car skidded almost backward down the highway. He lost track of the trailer; his elbows locked, his hands braced against the wheel. There was a snow-covered median strip, and the car was skidding backward into it. Where was the trailer? he thought. He searched for the electric brake, couldn’t find it as he fought the wheel again. The steering was mushy and useless, the car out of control completely. His fists locked on the wheel anyway, his elbows locked, and his shoulders braced. “Holy God!”
The car stopped, so suddenly Frost forgot to breathe, was uncertain if he could. Then the car shuddered and there was a groaning sound, the groaning of metal against metal, and the car shifted suddenly forward, then stopped—dead.
Frost raised his head, looked at Jessica Pace, then murmured, “You O.K., kid?”
Her hair was in her eyes, her face was white, her eyes wide and glassy. “Yeah—I think—you O.K.?”
“My neck hurts a little,” Frost said, trying to turn around, trying to see if there was anything left of the rear end of the car or the trailer.
“What happened?”
“All of a sudden, I just lost it—whew!”
“I thought we were going to—”
“Wouldn’t that be insane?” Frost laughed, his hands shaking as he started to light a cigarette then thought better of it—what if they’d ruptured the gas tank? “The KGB and everybody else under the sun out to get us and we croak in an auto accident in a blizzard!”
“Yeah—I guess it would,” she answered, her voice trembling.
“Stay here—I’m gonna—”
“Not on your life—I’m getting out too!”
“Great—try your door,” he told her, suddenly tired, feeling hyperventilated, feeling the adrenaline subsiding in him.
Frost stepped out, his sixty-five-dollar shoes instantly filling with wet snow. He held on to the roofline of the car as he started back, then stopped. The trailer had crashed down on the left rear fender, then bounced away from it. He didn’t know if the car was drivable or not. He walked closer to the trailer. The tongue was bent in a sharp right angle and the rear end of the car was half-buried in a rut where the trailer had impacted it into the snow and the sand below it.
“We’re stuck, huh?”
Frost looked at Jessica Pace and started to laugh. “I’m sorry I lost my temper with you before.” He gestured with his hands. “Before this happened... I was—”
“I know,” the girl answered.
“And to answer your question—we can’t haul the trailer, the rear end of the car is stuck so deep we can’t unhitch and try pushing it out. So, yeah—we’re stuck all right. And if we don’t get into the trailer and get the heat going quick, we’re gonna freeze to death. Unless maybe a truck comes along later and hits that same patch of ice, then crashes into us and kills us before we freeze to death—just hope those propane tanks are full.”
Frost knew what to do if you were trying to survive a blizzard in a stuck automobile. Run the heat only as necessary, keep the tail pipe clear at all times, keep a downwind window cracked at all times—there was a standard and well-thought-out list. But common sense dictated saying in the trailer—and so did the volume of snow. If the propane tanks went out, he could try to crank the car and use the fuel in the gas tank to heat them. He bent down and unplugged the electrical connection between the car and the trailer. There was always the option of running the car with the trailer battery if need be, or using the car battery for electricity in the trailer. But if they ran out of propane, all the trailer heating system would do is blow cold air, the thermostat constantly calling for heat that wasn’t there. He made a mental note to get out several times during the time they were stuck and crank the engine of the LTD to keep the battery alive and the radiator from freezing if the temperature dropped that low.
“We’re lucky we’re alive,” the girl was staying as she started toward the trailer.
Frost clambered over the bent trailer tongue and stood beside her. “You can say all you want,” he began, almost affectionately touching the undamaged right rear fender of the ’78 Ford, “but there’s nothing like a big, full-sized car. If we’d been driving something much smaller that trailer would have pulled us, or maybe turned this car into an accordion.”
“I’ll get the heat going—and fix us some lunch?”
“Yeah,” Frost murmured. He looked up at the sky; he couldn’t see it for the falling snow.
Frost shuddered. He wasn’t running the radio to conserve the battery; or the heat either, to conserve gasoline. With the wind howling across the snow-covered wastes, the car—the windows frosted over—was like he imagined a tomb would be in the middle of an Alaskan winter. But the engine was responding and running smoothly. Frost kept it running long enough to evaporate any moisture rather than come back the next time and find the engine had seized. His body was shaking, despite the heavy gray turtleneck sweater he wore under the jeans jacket. And his feet were cold. He’d left his sixty-five-dollar shoes to dry out in the trailer and had switched to his combat boots and boot socks—but his feet still felt as though they were freezing. He decided it was psychological. A blizzard in such an ordinarily hot place, in a place where such a bizarre weather situation was even more bizarre.
He turned off the key switch and got out of the car, locking it. He would have almost welcomed a thief. He smiled, his mustache starting to freeze. There had been no one on the highway since the accident—not even a road crew or a police officer.
Frost fought his way back through the drifts, toward the trailer door, clambering over the bent tongue and walking along the trailer body. The snow, drifted around the trailer, was nearly waist-high now. He hammered his fist on the door; when it opened he half-stumbled inside. It was warm, the propane s
upply holding up—he wondered how long. One light burned in the trailer ceiling; either that bulb would go out or the electricity would go because of the drain on the battery. He could always start the car and let the battery from the car charge the trailer battery, but that would burn up the gasoline. He was saving doing that until he needed to.
“Why don’t you shut off the light, Jessica?” he stammered.
“The electricity?”
“Yeah—maybe,” Frost said, skinning out of the jacket. He stripped away the last sleeve, wiped off his boots with a towel, and stood up, going over to the thermostat. If they lowered the desired temperature, the thermostat would stop calling for heat and the fan would be used less—less electricity to drain the battery.
“We’re doin’ O.K., aren’t we?” he heard her ask.
He turned around, looking at her. “Yeah—I don’t think we’ll become anonymous victims of the great blizzard or something if that’s what you mean. At least the KGB and everybody are just as stuck as we are now.”
“You want some coffee?”
“Only if you give me a whiskey chaser.” Frost smiled.
“You got it—hey, tell me about yourself. Like the eye patch—I mean if you don’t feel uncomfortable talking about it.”
“Not much to tell, really,” Frost began, a smile crossing his lips. He walked past her where she stood by the stove, then sat by the table at the front of the trailer, looking through the one bare patch on the window where snow hadn’t stuck or drifted, looking at her in the bright reflected light from the snow, the trailer otherwise dark except for a candle she’d lit on the table. “See—I’d always wanted to join the circus, be like my boyhood hero the Great Farquarhdt—he was a lion tamer.”
“You’re kidding,” she said, handing him the coffee and setting a tumbler of Seagram’s on the table beside him, then sitting down opposite him, huddling in a sweater.
“No—I’m in deadly earnest,” Frost told her. “Well—the circus came to town and I ran off from home, joined the circus—the boyhoood dream only partially fulfilled. After some weeks I got to know the Great Farquarhdt—even let me call him by his right name eventually. Elmo Farquarhdt. Well, he knew I was interested in being a lion tamer just as he was, so in my off hours when I wasn’t taking tickets for the bearded-fat-lady snake charmer—”
“They had one woman who was the bearded lady, the fat lady, and the snake charmer?”
“It was a small show on a tight budget,” Frost responded. “But anyway, when I had some off moments Elmo Farquarhdt would take me aside. He began to teach me all he knew about lions and lion-taming and about circus biz—it was fascinating. Well, eventually, he started teaching me how to train the lions, to do what he did. There was this one lion—Claude—”
“I always figured they were declawed.”
“No—I said Claude.”
’Yeah—ohh—the lion had gotten clawed?”
“No—the lion was Claude.”
“That’s just what I said,” Jessica insisted.
“Well—the lion was Claude—Claude. You know. Like Farquarhdt was Elmo, the lion was Claude.”
“Ohh—the lion was Claude?”
“No—he was never clawed—lions don’t claw other lions. He was Claude.”
“Ohh.”
“Anyway, Claude was the lion Elmo Farquarhdt used to do his most death-defying part of the act with.”
“Claude?”
“Right,” Frost said. “Elmo Farquarhdt would stick his head inside Claude’s mouth—always got a standing ovation. We were in this one town, I remember—Dinky.”
“It was a dinky town?”
“No, Dinky wasn’t dinky at all—Dinky, Idaho, good-sized place.”
“Ohh—”
“Well, I’d been practicing with Claude and Elmo Farquarhdt before we got to Dinky and it was decided I could try Elmo’s trick with Claude in Dinky.”
“You mean Elmo’s trick in Claude in Dinky?”
“Right,” Frost answered. “But—unbeknownst to me, Claude was having an attack of indigestion—belching a lot. Elmo was used to Claude having indigestion, but never like in Dinky. He didn’t want me to go on, but I insisted. Came the time for the highlight of the act. There I was, resplendent in my borrowed knee-length tights—”
“Knee-length tights?” She laughed.
“Elmo Farquarhdt was five feet one.”
“Ohh.”
“Well—Claude was really troubled, belching a lot. As I started to put my head in Claude’s mouth, Elmo Farquarhdt was shouting, “Alto—alto!”
“There was another lion named Aldo?”
“No—Farquarhdt was Spanish, I think. Elmo Farquarhdt was just a stage name. But I did it anyway, stuck my head in Claude’s mouth—and then it happened.”
“What?”
“This giant belch and his tongue shot up to the roof of his mouth, those huge teeth, my eye going up toward them—” Frost turned away and tugged at his eyepatch.
“You poked your eye out on a lion’s tooth?”
“No,” Frost smiled. “I pulled my head out of Claude’s mouth just in time and rolled across the sawdust-covered floor. Well, Elmo was wearing his old tights and no shoes—and there was a hole in the big toe.”
“What?”
“Never cut his toenails, Elmo—walked over to my still-moving body—stubbed his toe right into my—”
“Ohh, shut up.” She laughed and reached across the table and hugged him.
They talked late into the night, the girl telling Frost about herself finally. She had been in graduate school when she had suddenly been approached by something she thought at the time was the CIA, but had turned out to be Calvin Plummer’s group—an organization far more secretive. She discovered that they had learned more about her than she remembered about herself, that they wanted to have her undergo some specific training, and if she passed it, they would tell her why they were so terribly interested in her. There had been training in the Russian language. She had listened to mysterious piecemeal tapes of a Russian woman, tried to learn to imitate her voice. She had had weapons training, with both Soviet and American firearms... martial-arts training, courses in the history of Communism, courses in Soviet daily life. She had undergone a period where she had lived for one year with Americans who only spoke Russian, read only Russian books and newspapers, ate Russian food, wore Russian-made clothes. And then they had told her—about the Russian woman she was supposed to replace. They had surgically broken her leg so she would match the Russian woman physically. They had told her the surgical technique they planned to use on her fingertips and palms was radical, new—perhaps would be unsuccessful. After four operations, she had been shown her fingerprints and those of the Russian woman—she had not been able to tell them apart. She had been told later that by some quirk of fate, the prints had been very close to begin with—perhaps she and the Russian woman were distant relatives, perhaps something else. No one had conjectured why—at least openly. Then there had been the switch and ever since she had been living the life of a loyal KGB agent—waiting for the big intelligence break to come along. The list of double agents in the CIA and FBI was that break; she’d memorized the list, then planned her escape. Once she made it to the President, revealed the names on the list, and was free of what she knew, she would dye her hair, get contact lenses to give her a different eye color, then go off and live in some small town under a new identity. “I have it all planned. They promised before I began that they’d help me when I came back, help me to start over again.”
“You think it’ll be that simple?” Frost asked, pulling on his coat.
“Where are you going?”
“Start the car once more—then hook up the battery and let the car run and the engine charge us up. The heat’s going to kick off. That light I tried wasn’t burned out—the power was gone.”
“What do you mean, do I think it’ll be that easy?”
“Well—do you?”
“
No,” she said, a curious smile crossing her face like a shadow. “I don’t.”
Frost shrugged the rest of the way into his jacket and started out through the door.
Heavy trucks were moving in convoy by morning—and the propane had run out as well. The last truck in the convoy stopped. Frost and the girl got their things together and hitched aboard into the next town—to have attempted to tow the car out of a giant snowdrift, in which there was a hole by the driver’s side front door, would have been impossible without ripping off the front bumper. The truck driver had given Frost a red bandanna to tie to the antenna of the car as a warning flag that it was there, in front of the trailer. Perhaps that would prevent a snowplow from further destroying it.
The snow had stopped before sunrise, and by noon, when Frost and the girl climbed down from the cab of the eighteen-wheeler, the snow was melting. The street was a sea of slush and muddy water. “Thanks—anytime you need someone’s arm broken, call me,” Frost told the driver, shaking the man’s hand warmly.
“Yeah—thanks, fella. Good luck to you and the lady, huh?”
When the truck had started slowly away from the slushy curb, Frost and Jessica had stepped back to avoid the splash. Frost looked at the girl, telling her, “That guy thought I was kidding about breaking somebody’s arm for him—ha!”
She looked at Frost, then laughed. There was a two-story, squarish-looking building at the far end of the street in the middle of a slushy-looking parking lot. A sign hung over the door, proclaiming it a restaurant; and Frost, taking the girl’s elbow, started toward it. He was hungry after the drive and for once in his life craved a lot of people around him; there was enough cars in the restaurant lot that it had to be packed.
Frost slung the girl up in his arms and carried her halfway across the parking lot—she wore track shoes and the muddy water was washing over the top of his combat boots.
They had taken little from the the camper—the girl a huge purse with some clothes and her gun in it, Frost a backpack loaded with clothes and weapons. He set her down on the comparatively dry cement apron in front of the restaurant door and shifted his pack into his left hand. “Come on—I’ll buy you some lunch, huh?”
