The sun is gone. Ancient images of stars and planets commence filling the night sky.
The moon crawls above the Winds at my back, and I cast a lunar shadow across the road. The empty, pruinose highway stretches on, north and south, as far as I can see.
I’m so cold. I stand and stamp my feet on the road. Instead of sitting back down on the shoulder, I walk out into a thigh-deep drift and make a snow angel. Lying flat on my back, a wall of white enclosing me, all I can see now is the cosmos, and all I can feel is the steady infusion of cold.
My thoughts become electric.
I think of Orson’s poem. Defiant. Courageous perhaps.
If we’d never stepped into your tunnel, we’d still be in this desert.
Mom…
Walter…
I will not be returning to North Carolina.
As the cold strengthens, the madness seems to ebb, and my mind clears.
Peace overruns me.
I’m nearly asleep when the distant mumble of a car engine reaches me. For a moment, I consider whether I should lie here and die. I’ve stopped shivering, and false warmth flows through me.
I struggle to sit up. Headlights appear, heading northbound out of Rock Springs. I rise, brush the snow from my clothes, and trudge stiffly into the road. A transfer truck, I predict, and standing on the dotted line, I wave my arms when the beam strikes me.
Much to my surprise, the bumper of a long white suburban stops ten feet from my waist.
The driver’s window lowers at my approach, and a man several years my junior smiles until he sees the bruises that blacken my face. Elbows on the console, his pretty wife looks warily at me, the side of her face lit blue by the lucent dashboard clock. Three children sleep in the backseat, spread across one another in a tangle of small sibling appendages.
“Are you all right?” the husband asks.
“I don’t know. I just…I need a ride to the next town. Wherever you’re going. Please.” The man glances at his wife. Her lips purse.
“Where’s your car?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Well, how’d you get here?”
“Will you please take me to the next town? You’re the only car that’s passed all night.”
The man turns once more to his wife, their eyes consulting.
“Look, we’re going to visit family in Montana,” he says. “But Pinedale is about fifty miles up the road. We’ll take you that far. You can hop in through the back.”
“Thank you. I’ll grab my things.”
“Richard,” his wife mutters.
I lift my suitcases from the snow and walk to the back of the suburban. Opening the cargo doors, I stow my luggage on the floor and climb inside.
“Please keep it down back there,” the wife whispers. “We want them to sleep through the night.” She motions to her children as though she were displaying jewels.
The rear bench seat has been removed, so I find a place on the floor amid the family’s luggage: a red cooler, canvas bags, suitcases, a laundry basket filled with toys. With my suitcases at my feet, I curl up against the cooler and draw my knees into my chest. We begin to move, and I stare out the back window, watching the linear moonlit strip of highway spooling out beneath the tires with increasing speed.
We climb subtly for a half hour. Then we’re cruising along a plateau, and I’m looking back across the desolate flatland, scanning for two black specks in the sea of snow.
In the front seat, the woman whispers to her husband, “You’re a sweet man, Rich.” She strokes the back of his neck.
The vents channel warmth into my face, and the speakers emit a solacing oceanic ambience: sparse piano, waves and seagulls, the calming voice of a man reading Scripture.
And as Orson, Luther, and the Maddings harden on the cabin porch, in the massive desertic silence, I bask in the breathing of the children.
THE END
About Blake Crouch
Table of Contents
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN
By J. CARSON BLACK
J. Carson Black’s Amazon Author Central page
About the Author
Table of Contents
To the memory of my father:
A stray breeze on a hot day
The sun gentle on my face
1
VAIL, ARIZONA
Francis X. Entwistle showed up in Laura Cardinal’s bedroom at three in the morning, looking world-weary.
“Don’t get up, Lorie. Just wanted to give you a heads-up. A bad one’s coming.”
Frank’s complexion was pale and there were shadows under his eyes. In life, his face had been dull red from the high blood pressure that had killed him. A bottle of Tanqueray gin sat on the window table and the tumbler in Frank’s hand was about a quarter full. Laura didn’t own any tumblers and she didn’t drink gin.
Laura wasn’t entirely surprised that her old mentor was sitting in the straight-backed Mexican chair in her bedroom four months after his wife had buried him. Maybe because she knew she was dreaming. Or maybe because he was her last link to her parents, and she didn’t want him to be gone for good. Frank Entwistle leaned forward, the nightlight from the bathroom illuminating the scroll of white hair above his side part. “You’re gonna have to pay attention and keep on paying attention.”
He stopped to scratch the tip of his nose. Laura Cardinal realized the absurdity of the situation: Sitting in her bed at three in the morning, watching a dead homicide cop scratching his nose.
“I’m talking about the kind of thing, you aren’t careful, could come back around and bite you in the ass. The key word here is vigilance.”
She wanted him to clarify what he meant by that, but he was starting to fade.
He held his glass up in a salute. “Watch your back, kiddo.”
When she caught the case the next day, there was no doubt in Laura’s mind that it was the one Frank Entwistle had alluded to.
It was the weekend, and she was at her little house on the guest ranch where she lived rent-free. The owner, a friend from high school, liked the idea of having a criminal investigator from the Arizona Department of Public Safety living on his property.
The dream about Frank Entwistle remained with her, vivid and unsettling. It didn’t feel like a dream. When she got up this morning, she sleepwalked into the bathroom. In the dim glow of the nightlight, she saw a ring on the table left by a sweating glass. Instantly she was wide awake, her heart rate going through the roof, until she realized the real culprit was Tom Lightfoot. Tom never remembered to use a coaster.
It was Tom who had been on her mind all morning, Tom who had preoccupied her since he left two days ago on a packing trip to New Mexico.
This was because of the note stuck to the refrigerator: “Maybe we should live together - T”
Not “Love, T,” she noticed. The word “love” scared her anyway, so she wouldn’t hold that against him. What she did hold against him was the fact that he had blindsided her, leaving that note on her refrigerator and then creeping out of town. She couldn’t reach him in the back country. She couldn’t say they’d only been together two and a half months, that his house was just over the hill, that just because he spent every night with her anyway, he shouldn’t think he could move in. Living together was a whole different proposition from sleeping together. The last man she had lived with had been her husband, and that had not turned out well.
What bothered Laura most, though, was the part of her that leaped at the thought.