Snow Bound Page 4

  She wiped the fog from his side of the windshield and then her side. She couldn’t see anything. No bridge, no road,—nothing. “Where are we?” she said. “Do you know where we are? I don’t think we’re even on a road.”

  “There’s a bridge here somewhere,” he said. “Maybe I made a wrong turn. We’ll go ahead slow till we see where are we.”

  Fifteen minutes passed, and they still hadn’t come off whatever side road they were on. Cindy kept wiping the windshield and the window on her side, looking and trying to see something through the impenetrable curtain of snow. She thought of telling Tony to stop, but there was no place to stop. In front of them, in back of them, on all sides, she could see only snow—falling, blowing snow, piling up into incredible drifts. They hadn’t passed another car in at least half an hour. There were no houses, barns, stores, diners, or animals in sight. And Cindy became aware of something else—there were no wires, not a telephone or a light pole. Nothing. It was as if they’d driven off the edge of the world.

  “Which way?” Tony said. They’d come to a level place where the road seemed to divide. “Right or left?”

  “Go … left,” she said, and crossed her fingers.

  “I’m going right.” The car bumped and jumped and slid. They were rolling down a hill. Cindy put her hand to her mouth. They were off the road, she was sure of that now, and out of control. She sat on the edge of the seat, gripping it with both hands, as the car lurched and tossed down the hill and across the fields. There were wooded hills rising on both sides of them and more woods in front of them.

  “You idiot,” she cried in desperation. “You bragging idiot. You’ve got us lost!” And without thinking, in a fury of fear and anger, she grabbed the wheel and twisted it out of his hand.

  5

  THIS AWFUL SNOW

  Tony knocked the girl’s hand away and grabbed the wheel. The car was bumping across the field, out of control. He hung onto the wheel, twisting one way and then the other. He didn’t see the rocks and debris half buried in the snow until they hit, scraping, ramming into the boulders that threw the car half up in the air before they came to a stop. They were both thrown violently forward. “Holy Mary,” Tony said. “Holy Mother Mary. Oh, God.”

  The silence in the aftermath of the motor’s dying was eerie. Only the heater whirred. Tony automatically switched it off, then sat there dazed, unable to think. The wind had been knocked out of him. He didn’t look at the girl. His father was going to kill him when he found out he’d ruined the car. He would absolutely rip off his head.

  The girl was crumpled against the door, her hands over her face. “Why’d you do that?” he said. It was her fault, all her fault. Rage spurted through him. “You dumb cluck! You stupid female! You crazy bitch!” He kept at her even when she didn’t respond. She shouldn’t have grabbed the wheel. He knew he’d made a wrong turn, but he would have found the right way. He wasn’t a complete dope. He’d seen that the power poles along the side of the road had disappeared. He hadn’t said anything because he’d been hoping to come back on the road again where he’d recognize landmarks. But this snow! This awful snow. It had changed everything, splattering over the road and the trees and the fences, blowing against the windshield, obscuring his vision and his sense of direction, obliterating the landmarks he would have recognized, until he’d lost all sense of where they were. She’d fixed everything by getting hysterical and snatching the wheel, getting them marooned in this field.

  They’d never get out alone now, not in a thousand years. They’d have to wait to be towed out And when his father found out where they were and what he’d done to the car … He wasn’t thinking about his Uncle Leonard anymore. What was he going to tell his father? And his mother! It was her car. She loved her car.

  “You see what you did,” he said furiously. The girl still hadn’t spoken. “You!” He poked her in the side. “I’m talking to you.” He thought maybe she was crying, but when she turned toward him her face was covered with blood. “Holy Mary. What happened to you?”

  She looked at the blood on her hand and then felt it on her face. She pulled the mirror around to look at herself, touching her face with a handkerchief. She’d split her left eyebrow. She held the handkerchief to her forehead.

  “That’s not so bad,” he said. “It looked worse than it was. You’ll be all right.”

  She turned toward him, her face white and cold. She pointed through the snowflecked windshield to the nearly dark wooded hills rising on all sides of them. “Do you have any idea at all where we are now?”

  “We’ll be all right,” he said.

  “We’re in a terrible mess,” she said. “We’re lost and nobody knows where we are.”

  He wanted to get away from her and the infuriating things she was saying. He wanted to get out of the car and walk around, look at things for himself. But the door on his side was jammed shut against the rocks, and he didn’t want to slide by her and go out her side. “We’re not lost,” he said stubbornly, but he wasn’t so sure. He had to think. It was hard. His head hurt. It was dark already, and there was so much snow. The snow fell and fell. It fell silently without stopping, leaving him frustrated and angry. Why didn’t it stop! He turned the key in the ignition. The motor whined.

  She was watching him. “It won’t start,” she said. “We’re lost, and you can’t start the car. We’ll freeze to death.”

  He wanted to contradict her loudly, set her straight, show her a thing or two. “I know where I am.” He pointed to the hill in front of them. “That’s Bear Hill,” he said, plucking a name randomly from his mind. “And on your side, that’s Slant Rock. And over here where we are now, there’s a brook running. Deer Brook, that’s the name, Deer Brook.”

  She gave him a level, dubious look, but then craned her head to look out her side. “I can’t see any slanting rock,” she said.

  “Of course not, stupid! The snow’s covering it. But it’s there.”

  She gave him another of those long, disquieting looks. “Let’s get something straight. I told you my name. Lucinda. You can call me Cindy. My name is not ‘stupid.’ ”

  “Can’t you take a joke?” he said.

  “You don’t know me that well, and you’re not that funny. In fact, you’re very unfunny. I’m sorry I ever got into this car with you. It was probably the worst mistake of my life. I only hope I get out of this alive.”

  It was all he could do not to smack her. He’d never felt like hitting anyone as much as he wanted to hit this girl. “Don’t be a dope,” he said through taut lips. “Somebody’s going to come along pretty soon. I’m not worried. As soon as they plow out the main road, they’ll start on these smaller roads, and—”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she interrupted. “You took a car that wasn’t yours. You drove it without a license. You got us lost in the middle of nowhere. Everything you do is wrong.”

  She wouldn’t shut up. She kept at him until he began shouting, his voice louder than hers. “Shut your mouth! I’ll kick you out of this car. It’s my car. I can kick you out if I want to!”

  “You’re aren’t going to do anything to me,” she said. “If we were anywhere except in this God-forsaken place, I’d be out of this car in a second. Believe me, I’d be so happy to be anywhere else in the world, except with you!”

  Furious, frustrated, he punched her denim carry-all. “Open the door and get out of here,” he yelled. He shoved her against the door. “Go on! Out! Out out!”

  Her eyes opened wide in surprise and shock. He could see he’d frightened her, and he was glad; but she didn’t burst into tears and yell bloody murder for her mother as his sisters would have done. Instead she reached into her carry-all and brought out a thick school book. She faced him, holding the book in both hands. She was going to fight.

  “Nobody’s ever hit me before in my life, and you’re not going to start. I’ll get out when I’m good and ready, and not before.” She held the book high, daring him
to make another move.

  He reached across her, trying to open the door on her side. She cracked him smartly across the hand with the book. He jerked back and punched her in the arm. Instead of breaking down in sobs, she threw the book into his face, catching him painfully across the nose. Furiously he opened the window and threw her book into the snow. A blast of cold wind and snow cut across his cheek, and he rolled up the window fast.

  “You’re a bully,” she said. “I never in my life met anyone as mean and rotten as you.”

  He turned so he was facing away from her. His nose hurt, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of putting his hand to it. He made up his mind he wouldn’t fight with her again. He wouldn’t talk to her, either. Not that he was afraid of her. Hell, no. He could handle her with one hand behind his back.

  For a long time they sat apart from each other. His legs began to feel cramped and he wanted to stretch, but he wasn’t going to be the first one to make a move. It was also getting colder and colder in the car and his toes felt numb. Let her freeze. He wasn’t going to start the motor. They’d see how tough she really was!

  “Did you turn into a snowman?” Her voice startled him. She’d pulled her collar up and wound her scarf around her face. “I’m cold.” She rearranged herself so she was sitting on her feet, her hands tucked under her coat. “Try to start the car and give us some heat. I’m freezing.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” he said. But the cold seeping under the door and through the floor was affecting him, too. He turned the ignition key. A red light blinked on the instrument panel.

  “Won’t it start?” she asked. She watched as he turned the key on and off, on and off, pumping gas, leaving his foot down on the pedal, then lifting it off. He wasn’t sure which way was right. He only knew that after he’d tried the ignition a half dozen times he was sweating, half cursing, half praying. He could smell gasoline. He was flooding the engine. They would have to wait.

  “If you can’t start the car, we’re going to freeze,” Cindy said in a remote voice. “We might be here a week before they find us, and when they do we’ll be frozen to death.”

  He hated her. She was crazy. They were going to be out of here at the latest tomorrow. “Somebody’s going to come,” he insisted. “We’re going to be found.”

  “No. Not a single car has come by while we’ve been here. We’re not on a road. If we were on a road, we’d have a chance. But we’re nowhere! We don’t know how far away the road is. It might be a mile away or five miles, or even more.”

  “Maybe there’s a car coming right now,” Tony said loudly. He put up a hand. “Shut up and listen!” He’d have liked to hold her mouth shut the way he did to Donna when she babbled too much. He raised his head and listened tensely. What he wouldn’t have given to see or hear a car or a snowplow. Anything to prove her wrong. He listened, concentrating and straining; but except for the steely, wind-driven patter of snow against metal and glass, there was nothing.

  “You see. There’s nobody,” she said.

  “Shut up. It’s too soon,” he said. “They’ll come. It’s still snowing and everyone’s off the road and staying home right now. The snowplows will be out later.”

  “You hope,” she said. She blew on her hands. “Try the key again, maybe it’ll start now.”

  He turned the key. The engine flared to life. “It was flooded before,” he said, feeding gas and listening to the muffled sound of the exhaust.

  For the first time she smiled at him. “That sounds so good.” She put her hands out to the heater. “I’m so glad you got it started.”

  He climbed over the seat and forced open the back door on his side. “Where are you going?” she said. He didn’t answer. He was down on his knees clearing the snow away from the exhaust pipe. Then, opening the back door again, he removed a piece of cardboard his father kept there and put it on the outside of the radiator to make the water heat up faster. Shaking as much snow off himself as he could, he got back in the car and crawled into the front seat. He’d only glanced at the damage outside; the whole side of the car was punched in. There was no use thinking about it now.

  “Where’d you learn that?” Cindy said. “That was smart.” It was the first time she’d spoken to him with respect.

  He shrugged. “I know a lot more than that.”

  The car heated rapidly. The cold air still came in through the cracks, but it was bearable. Tony glanced at the gas gauge. The indicator hovered around the half mark. Cindy was holding her feet up to the heater. He considered turning the engine on and off to conserve fuel, but then he thought that when the storm cleared—by morning, for sure—they’d find help, so why bother?

  “Don’t you think we ought to open a window, Tony?” Cindy said. “There might be carbon monoxide leaking in.”

  “So open it.” He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. He told himself that when he woke up it would be morning, the snowstorm would have ended, and they’d be rescued. He listened to the uneven throbbing of the engine—like the furnace at home, he thought. In an hour or two his parents and his sisters would realize he was gone. Did his father come straight home from work Tuesday night, or was that the night he ate lasagna on Third Street before he went to his union executive board meeting? Even so, his father would be home by ten thirty or eleven at the latest, and when his mother told him that Tony had taken the car, his father would throw a fit. They’d probably check his friends’ homes before they’d think something had really happened to him and call the police.

  Would they ever guess that he’d started for his Uncle Leonard’s? He couldn’t tell about his parents. Sometimes they acted as if they didn’t think of anything, and other times they put things together fast. What about the night he’d slept in the clubhouse earlier that fall, in October? He’d had a fight with his father and he’d walked out of the house, telling himself they could darn well figure out where he was. But when he came in the following morning for breakfast, expecting all hell to break loose, his mother was calm and his father gave him a cheery hello. They’d known where he was right along and hadn’t minded at all. So maybe they weren’t worrying about him now, either.

  Tony sighed and looked out the window at the relentlessly falling snow, the dark luminescent sky that pressed down on them like a suffocating blanket. What a mess! As he started to doze off, panic raced away with him. What if it snowed for two or three days? Or even a week, as Cindy had said. He wouldn’t admit it to her, but those things weren’t unknown in this snow country. He pushed away the terrifying thoughts. He wouldn’t think that way. “It’s going to be okay,” he told himself. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  6

  A NIGHT OF ICE

  In the dream it was night and the streets were empty and cold. Cindy passed a bus, its windows filled with a cold greenish light. Three men were sitting inside, looking straight ahead, their faces green as ducks. A woman urged Cindy to get in, but she was afraid. She ran across the street and up on a wide porch of a house. Through a window she saw a boy about her age motioning to her. She tried the door. It opened. She was enveloped in a delicious heat. As she stood in the darkened hallway a door above her opened. A man all in white appeared at the head of the stairs, sitting up in a hospital bed. “Stop! Don’t move,” he ordered. “I’ll call the police.”

  Cindy awoke suddenly, an anxious, tight feeling in her throat. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. Her arms and legs were stiff and cramped, her neck felt broken. Slowly she became aware of the car, the cramped position in which she’d been sleeping. Through the frosted windshield a silvery gray light sifted into the car.

  It was morning, but it could have been twilight. Cindy felt as if a lifetime had passed—heavy frozen hours—a night of ice. It was still snowing. In the back seat she saw Tony’s dark inert shape. Carbon monoxide. The thought flashed in her head like a white light. He lay there so heavily, lifelessly, like a sack. She couldn’t hear his breath
ing. The back of her own head felt strange, as if wires were being pulled. Her eyelids drooped. She could feel every bone in her body, fragile and brittle as straws.

  “Tony!” Cindy rolled down the window and gulped icy air. “Tony, wake up. Are you all right?”

  He struggled up, blinked, and rubbed the saliva off his mouth. “What’s the matter? Why’d you wake me?” He sounded cross and not the least bit dead. “Shut the window, for God’s sake!”

  “I’m afraid of carbon monoxide poisoning. I thought you were being affected.”

  “Oh, shit.” He lay back again.

  She sat there with the window open, drawing in icy gulps of the snow-thickened dawn air. The wind had died down. The snow fell like a veil of silvery ice into a silence unlike any she’d ever known before. There was no sound. No wind, no birds, no hum of distant motors. Only the sound of snow falling, which was no sound at all.

  It was so absolutely still that she could almost imagine she was dead. Only Tony’s presence and the cold that was biting her cheeks told her otherwise. Tony had no such silly thoughts. “Shut the window,” he ordered. “Cripes!” He was in a foul mood. He twisted around in the seat, stretching his legs and throwing out his arms. Cindy had to duck to avoid his feet.

  She rolled up the window, at the same time becoming aware that the heater was blowing cold air into the car. “What’s the matter? Why aren’t we getting warm air?” She leaned forward to look at the various buttons and knobs on the instrument panel.

  Tony swore under his breath. “We’re out of gas!” He reached over the front seat to snap off the heater. “Keep the goddamn windows shut or we’ll never stay warm till help comes.”

  Until help comes? She struggled to keep her imagination from running wild. Think warm thoughts, Cindy. Buttered toast … steaming cocoa … a hot, hot bath … But despite herself the car got colder by the minute. She was chilled right to the bone; her legs felt as if they were cast in ice. She could almost feel her lungs filling with ice and had to fight the choking feeling that took hold of her. She rubbed hard at her eyes, hiding her face against the stained, oily seat cushions. “What am I doing here?” she whispered. Who was she whispering to? Why hadn’t she met someone older with sense and experience, someone like her father.