“It hurts to stay like this.”
The road leveled off and the Rover’s headlights passed over another signpost: Cinnamon Pass Elevation 12,640 Feet. Several inches of snow on everything in this tundra world. No trees or shrubs but only rock and nothing visible beyond fifty feet through the fog and pouring snow, the light more like dusk than early afternoon. In some outpost of emotion, divorced from the horror of the moment, Jack found the isolated beauty of this pass heartbreaking. The kind of wild place his father had loved to take him when he was a boy.
He brought the Rover to a stop and turned off the car and threw open his door.
“What are you doing, Jack?”
“Just checking things out. You guys can sit up now.”
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He stepped down into the snow and shut his door. He strained to listen. At first, just the infinitesimal pattering of snowflakes falling on his shoulders, the ticking of the cooling engine, the wind, the invisible shifting of rocks on some obscured peak. Then he heard them—impossible to tell how far away, but the distant groan of engines became audible in the gloom below the pass, muffled by the snow. He got back into the car and cranked the engine and they went on. Jack shifted into four-wheel low. The road descending, the tires sliding on ice down the steeper grades. After two miles, shrubs appeared again. Then tiny, crooked fir trees. They dropped into a forest and a stream fell in beside the road. Still snowing here, but the snow had only begun to collect.
Jack turned off the jeep trail.
They went across a meadow and forded a stream and climbed up the bank into a grove of fir trees. He turned off the car and got out and walked back to the stream and stared across the meadow toward the road. The mist had all but dissolved in the trees. He looked back at the Rover, parked behind a grouping of blue spruce, then back to the road again. He scrambled down the bank to the edge of the stream and had started to cross over to test the soundness of their hiding place from the meadow. The rumbling chorus of engines stopped him. He went back up the bank. Dee and Cole had gotten out of the Rover and were coming toward him. He waved them back. “The trucks are coming.”
“Can they see us from the road?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced back at the meadow, imagined he could see the Rover’s tire tracks in the dusting of snow, though he wasn’t sure. The tread had definitely bitten into the soft dirt of the bank if the men in the trucks could see that far. The engines got quiet and then loud again. “Come on,” he said. They jogged through the wet grass around the spruce trees. The Rover reeked of hot brake fluid. Jack saw Naomi lying down across the backseat, headphones in her ears. He knocked on the glass of Cole’s window. She cut her eyes up at him and he held a finger to his lips and she nodded. They crouched behind the car.
Jack said, “I’m going to find a spot where I can watch the road.”
“Can I come?”
“No, buddy, I need you to stay here and take care of Mama. I won’t be far.” He looked at Dee. “Be ready to run.”
Jack jogged back toward the stream and ducked behind a boulder that rose to his shoulders. The trees dripping. Snowing hard. He could smell the spruce. The wet rock. Already the ground was white. He poked his head around the rock as the second truck emerged from the trees. It went alongside the meadow. He said, “There are no tracks to see, just keep moving, keep moving,” and it kept moving as the third and fourth and fifth trucks rolled into view—Dodge Rams, snow-blasted except for the engine-warmed hoods and the heated cabs. He could see white faces through the fogged glass of the passenger windows. He ducked back behind the rock and sat down in the snow and studied the smooth motion of his watch’s second hand. When it had made three revolutions, the engine noises had completely faded, and the only sound was the dripping trees. The pounding of his heart.
They unloaded their camping equipment from the back of the Land Rover and Jack unpacked their tent and read its instruction manual. Spent an hour trying to assemble the poles and unravel the mystery of how the tent attached to them. The snow was ankle-deep and still falling when he finally raised the four-man dome. They carried their sleeping bags and air cushions over from the car and tossed them inside. Dee and the kids took off their wet shoes and climbed in.
“I’ll be in in a little while,” Jack said. “Warm it up for me.”
He zipped them in.
With the new hunting knife, Jack cut large squares out of the plastic sheeting. He wiped the snow off the windowframes, dried the wet metal with the sleeves of his shirt, and duct-taped the plastic squares over three windows on the right side of the car and a large rectangle over the back hatch. You couldn’t see anything distinctly through the plastic, so he taped a piece over the intact glass of Cole’s window as well.
He spent the rest of the afternoon picking Naomi’s windowglass out of the backseat and the floor mats. Reorganizing everything in the cargo area. He checked the oil and washer fluid and tire pressure. When he’d finished, he looked for something else to do, needing his hands to be busy, his mind in the moment. It still snowed. He thought the sky had imperceptibly darkened, the afternoon sliding toward dusk. He hacked some limbs off a dead spruce and snapped off a few clusters of brown needles toward the base of the tree that had been shielded from the weather.
The stream was freezing. He picked a dozen fist-size rocks out of the water and stretched out his tee-shirt and loaded them all into the pouch it made. Inside the fire ring, he stacked wads of tissue paper and the browned spruce needles and a handful of twigs and enclosed them all in a framework of larger branches. Last fire he’d built had been at their home in Albuquerque the previous Christmas, and he’d cheated, used a brick of firestarter to get things going.
His hands trembled in the cold as he held the lighter to the tissue paper and struck a flame.
Later, he heard the tent unzip. Dee crawled out, stepped into her wet shoes. She walked over and stood beside him.
“I guess it literally takes the end of the world to get a family camping trip.”
“I’m just trying to get a fire going so we can dry some stuff out.”
A wisp of smoke lifted out of the pitiful pile of blackened twigs and half-burnt tissue paper.
“You’re shivering. Come into the tent and get some sleep. I have your sleeping bag ready for you.”
He stood, his legs cramping. He’d been squatting for over an hour.
“Are you hungry?” he said.
“Will you let me worry about dinner? Please. Go sleep.”