Perfect Little Town

-1-

They arrive midmorning, the Benz G-Class rolling down Main Street with its California tags and rear end sagging under the weight of luggage, and though the windows are tinted, we bet the occupants are smiling. Everyone smiles when they come to our town, population 317. It’s the mountains and fir trees, the waterfall we light up at night and the clear western sky and the perfect houses painted in brilliant colors and the picket-fenced lawns and the shoppes we spell the olde English way and the sweet smell of the river running through.

Parking spaces are plentiful in the off-season. They choose a spot in front of the coffeehouse, climb out with their smiles intact, squinting against the high-altitude sun—a handsome couple just shy of forty, their fashionably-cut clothes and hair in league with their Mercedes SUV to make announcements of wealth that we all read loud and clear.

We serve them lattes, handmade Danishes from the pastry case, and they drop dollar bills into our tip vase, amused at the cleverness of the accompanying sign: “Don’t be chai to espresso your gratitude.” They lounge for a half hour in oversize chairs, sipping their hot drinks and admiring the local art hanging on the walls. As they finally rise to leave, the woman shakes her head and comments to her husband that they don’t make towns like this anymore.

-2-

They wander through the downtown, browsing our shops as the sky sheets over with leaden clouds.

From us they buy:

a half-pound of fudge

five postcards

energy bars from the hiking store

a pressed gold aspen leaf in a small frame

They tell us what a perfect little town we have and we say we know. Everywhere they go, they ask exuberant questions, and we answer with enthusiasm to match, and in turn solicit personal information under the guise of chitchat—Ron’s a plastic surgeon, Jessica a patent attorney. They drove from Los Angeles, this being their first vacation in four years.

We ask if they’re enjoying themselves.

Oh yes, they say. Oh yes.

-3-

They each have a camera. They shoot everything:

The soaring, jagged mountains in the backdrop

Deer grazing the yard of a residence

The quaint old theatre

The snow that has just begun to fall and frost the pavement

They ask us to take pictures of them together and, of course, we happily oblige.

-4-

The day wears on.

The light fades.

It snows harder with each passing hour.

Up and down Main, Christmas lights wink on.

It is winter solstice, the darkest evening of the year, and when the Stahls attempt to leave town, they find the highway closed going both directions, the gates lowered across the road and padlocked, since what has become a full-blown blizzard is sure to have made high-mountain travel exceedingly dangerous.

Or so we tell them.

-5-

They approach the front desk.

“Welcome to the Lone Cone Inn.” And we smile like we mean it from the bottom of our hearts.

Ron says, “It appears we’re stuck for the night in Lone Cone. Could we have a—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re booked solid. I just sold our last room not two minutes before you walked in.”

We watch with subtle glee as they glance around the lobby, empty and quiet as a morgue, no sound but the fire burning in the hearth.

The wife chimes in with, “But we haven’t seen another tourist, and we’ve been here all day.”

“I apologize, but—”

“Is there another hotel in town?”

“There’s a motel, but it’s closed for the season.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“I’m not sure I under—”

“It’s a blizzard out there, the roads are closed, and now you’re telling us you’re the only game in town, and you’re booked?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Where are we supposed to sleep? Our car?”

Jessica appears on the verge of tears.

We hand Ron a notepad and tell him to write down his cell phone number, promising to call if something opens up.

-6-

Ron and Jessica sit in their Mercedes, watching the snow accumulate on the windshield, piling up in the city park, a deep bluish tint settling over Lone Cone.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Ron?”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because I thought you were the one who was supposed to call and get us room reservations.”

“We weren’t gonna stay here, Jess. Remember? Spend the day and drive to Aspen.”

“Well it didn’t work out that way, did it?”

“No.”

“So maybe having reservations as a backup plan might’ve been a bright idea. Right, Ron?” He’s been staring through the glass, his hands gripping the steering wheel, and now he glances over at his wife, into that wild-eyed, exacting glare he figures she terrorizes her firm’s paralegals and secretaries with.

“What?” he says.

“Why didn’t you take care of that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you, Ron. I don’t want to sleep in my fucking car tonight. That isn’t what I had in mind for my Christmas vacation while busting my ass these last—”

“I get it, Jess.”

Ron pulls the key out of the ignition.

“What are you doing?”

“Baby, let’s go get a big, hot meal, drink the best wine on the list, and forget about all this shit for a while, okay?”

Jessica pushes her short brown hair behind her ears, Ron feeling, hoping he’s cut the right wire, disarmed the bomb.

“That actually sounds nice.” He has, and he loves this about her—how she can go from psychobitch to DEFCON 5 in two nanoseconds.

“My cell phone’s charged,” he says, “so let’s think positive thoughts. Maybe while we’re eating, we get a call from the inn, saying they’ve had a cancellation. This whole thing might just work out.”

Jessica’s smile makes Ron slide his hand over the console, let it work down between her blue-jeaned thighs.

“Hey now,” she warns. “You gotta earn that, big boy.”

“You think so?”

Apparently not, because she pulls his hand into her crotch and moves her hips forward and Ron undoes the button on her jeans and pushes his fingers between cotton and skin, until he feels the warm, wet slick, wondering if that’s been there since the rage, has a hunch it has.

She moans, stretching for the button on his slacks. Pulls his hand out of her pants and leans across the console into his lap.

He reaches down and finds the right button and the seat hums back, giving Jessica more headspace between his stomach and the steering wheel.

The windshield cracks. Flinching, Ron’s eyes shoot open and Jessica bites down and then pops off, and they both say, “What the fuck?” in unison.

-7-

Spiderwebs of splitting glass expand at right angles across the windshield as Ron zips his pants, throws the door open, and climbs out.

Standing in the pouring snow, he glimpses three shadows bolting across the park, hears the high cackle of children’s laughter.

Jessica screams, “This is a hundred thirty-thousand dollar Benz, you little shits!” as Ron lifts the fist-size rock off the hood.

“Perfect little town, huh?” Jessica says.

“Damn.”

“What’s wrong?”

Ron rubs his crotch.

“Oh, I’m sorry, babe,” Jessica says. “Startled me when the rock hit.”

“And that’s what you do when you get startled? Bite?” Ron tosses the rock into the snow. “Let’s go get dinner.”

“No, let’s report this to the police—”

“Look, I’m cold and hungry and my penis hurts. Let’s go get drunk at a nice restaurant and deal with this tomorrow. Positive thoughts, remember?”

-8-

They walk holding hands up the sidewalk of Main, snow dumping through the illumination of streetlamps.

“What time is it?” Jessica asks.

Ron glances at his watch. “Seven-fifteen.”

“So where the fuck is everybody? This town’s dead.”

She has a point. Every store they visited in the afternoon has closed shop for the night, the storefronts dark, not a sound in Lone Cone save the streetlamps.

They pass a brewpub, boarded up for the winter.

A café called The Sandwich Shoppe that only opens for lunch.

A bistro that has gone out of business.

As they near the north end of Main, Jessica says, “Ron, nothing’s open.”

“Yeah, seems that way, huh?”

“I’m starving.”

Ron steps out into the middle of Main, looks up and down the street—nothing moving, not even tire tracks through the five inches of snow that has fallen since late afternoon.

“This is bad, Ron, very—”

“Wait.”

“What?”

He smiles, probably hasn’t noticed it because the lights are so dim, but one block down on the other side of the street, through the first floor windows of an old building, he spots candlelight and tables, the lowlit ambience of what can only be, of what has to be, a fine restaurant.

-9-

As they stand at the podium in Christine’s, waiting for the hostess, Jessica leans over and whispers into Ron’s ear, “Why do you have an erection darling?”

“It’s not new,” he says. “Since you um,” he clicks his teeth together, “it won’t go down.”

“Oh. Lovely.”

They’re shown to a table by a window with a view onto the street, where they sit waiting for their server and watching the snow fill in their tracks.

“Kind of slow, aren’t they?” Jessica says.

“Relax, babe.”

“We’re the only ones in the restaurant.”

Ron reaches across the table, holds his wife’s hand.

“Despite all the drama, it’s wonderful to be here with you.”

She smiles, eyes shining in the firelight, says, “We’ve worked hard for this trip.”

“Should’ve done this a long time ago.”

“Easier said than done for a couple of workaholics.”

“You been thinking about work?”

“Little. You?”

“Guilty.”

“All your patients are still gonna be there when you get back, especially the ladies. Oh, Dr. Stahl. Fix my nose, Dr. Stahl. Suck the fat off my legs, Dr. Stahl.”

They talk by candlelight as the storm rages on the other side of the glass, Ron in the middle of describing the book he’s brought along to read, a biography of Calvin Coolidge, when Jessica’s face suddenly darkens.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’ve been sitting here fifteen minutes, and no one’s even come over to bring us water.”

They survey the restaurant, not another table occupied, no waiters to be seen, only the faintest sound coming from swinging metal doors that presumably lead to the kitchen.

“I’ll go get someone,” Ron says, rising from his chair.

He heads toward the back of the room, his face flushed with heat—anger—and just as he reaches the doors to the kitchen, a woman in a white oxford shirt and black apron bursts through carrying a tray of waters.

Ron sidesteps, avoiding a collision.

“I was just coming back to get someone,” Ron says. “We’ve been sitting out here for fifteen minutes and nobody’s—”

“I apologize for the delay,” the waitress says.

“No, it’s fine. Looks like you’re slammed out here.” Ron motions to the vacant restaurant.

The waitress laughs, just a teenager, and he feels bad for the sarcasm as he follows her back to their table and takes a seat.

“My name’s Mary-Elise, and I’ll be taking care of you. You folks decided on dinner yet?” She sets their water glasses on the table.

“We were only given the wine list,” Jessica says.

The waitress runs to the podium, grabs a pair of menus, hustles them back to the table.

“Any specials tonight?” Ron asks.

“I’m afraid not.”

The waitress turns to leave, but Jessica says, “No, honey. You wait right here. We won’t be long in deciding.”

The Stahls peruse the menu, place their orders, Ron buying a $175 bottle of Côtes du Ventoux, and everything seems temporarily better knowing food and wine is finally on the way.

-10-

The waitress presents the bottle to Ron, who holds it in his hands like a new baby and affirms that she brought the vintage he requested.

Mary-Elise finesses the corkscrew, expertly withdraws the cork, then pours a little wine into Ron’s glass.

He swirls it, sniffs, says, “No, something’s off.”

“What?” Jessica asks.

“Here, smell.”

Jessica inhales a whiff. “Vinegar.”

Ron says, “This wine’s spoiled. Do you have another bottle of the Côtes?”

“I’m sorry, this was our last.”

“Then just bring the Bordeaux.”

-11-

Jessica smiles when the waitress presents her entrée.

“Tell the truth,” Ron says. “You got the chicken pot pie just because it was forty dollars.”

“It’s an intriguing price for such a simple dish.”

Outside, it still snows, impossibly harder than before, and with the waitress gone, they have the restaurant all to themselves.

“Looks good,” Ron says, pointing his fork at Jessica’s dish.

The chicken pot pie barely fits on the plate, the crust perfectly gilded, steam rising through tiny holes in the center.

“I’m so hungry,” Jessica says, piercing the crust with her fork, scooping out a bite. “My God, worth every cent. How’s yours?”

Ron swallows a bite of his penne pasta with scallops and clam sauce.

“Unreal. You know, if we had to go through all this shit today just to have this meal, it might actually have been worth it.”

He lifts his glass, and as he tilts it up, wine running down his throat, eyes shut with pleasure, trying to think of a toast to make, Jessica gasps.

Ron looks across the table, sees blood pouring down his wife’s chin, two fishhooks dangling from her bottom lip. She spits something onto the table—a half-inch black oval that he mistakes for a rock or a seedpod until it scampers away.

Other roaches crawl out of the pot pie, and Ron instinctively stands and steps back, noticing now that more than fishhooks and roaches fill the pie. Mixed in with the carrots and potatoes and chicken, shards of glass glint in the candlelight.

Jessica vomits on the floor, and Ron feels the urge as well, his mouth watering heavily.

He helps his wife to stand and they back away from the table, Ron wondering what might be lurking in the pearl-colored clam sauce of the dish he already took two bites from, decides not to even contemplate it.

Jessica trembles, tears streaming down her face.

“Calm down, baby. Let me look.” In the lowlight, he sees that one of the hooks has barely lodged. “I can get this one out right now.”

Delicately, with surgeon’s hands, he works the hook out of the corner of her lip.

“This other one’s really embedded. I think the barb’s under the skin.”

“My tongue,” she cries.

“Let me see.”

She sticks it out, and even in the poor light, Ron can see the deep slice halfway up the right side of her tongue.

“Jesus, it’s bad. Do you think you swallowed any glass?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, stay here.”

“Where are you going?”

“To hurt somebody.”

“No, wait.” Her mouth has already begun to swell, blunting the sharpness of her consonants.

“Why?”

“Let’s just go find the sheriff.”

“No, fuck that.”

Ron rushes toward the back of the restaurant, his fists already clenched as he kicks open the metal doors.

The kitchen stands dark.

He says, “Anybody in here?”

-12-

They arrive at the front desk of the Lone Cone Inn, find the same stodgy clerk who they spoke with earlier in the day leaning back in a swivel chair, engrossed in a paperback romance.

“Excuse me?” Ron says, the clerk startling.

“Yes?”

“Where’s the hospital?” He gestures to Jessica, holding a burgundy cloth napkin over her mouth. “My wife needs medical attention.”

“I’m sorry, we only have a clinic, and it’s closed.”

“No hospital?”

“Nearest one’s thirty miles away, and as you know, the passes are closed tonight.”

“Okay, how about a sheriff?”

“Yes, but I’m sure his office is closed as well. It’s almost nine.”

“What’s your name?”

“Carol.”

“Tell me, Carol, what do the residents of this town do when they need an officer of the fucking peace?”

“Did something happen?”

“Yeah, something happened.”

“I guess I could try Sheriff Hanson at his home.”

“Really? I mean, I don’t want to put you out or anything just ‘cause someone put glass and hooks and roaches in my wife’s fucking dinner and almost cut her tongue in—”

“It’s not her fault, Ron.”

Carol lifts the phone, dials a number, after a moment, says, “Arthur? Hey it’s Carol. I’ve got the couple from out-of-town standing here at my desk, and I think they need your help…I don’t know…yeah, I think so…okay.”

She hangs up the phone.

“He’s coming down.”

“Thank you,” Ron says. “Now we were hoping you might have some other good news for us.”

“Like what?”

“We’ve had a really rough evening, and we need a…”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, we’re booked.”

“I’ll pay double. Triple. I don’t—”

“Sir, what do you want me to do? Kick someone out? I’m sorry, there’s no vacancy.”

-13-

They sit in the leather sofa by the fireplace, Ron holding Jessica, running his fingers through her hair, thinking they should be sitting in this lobby under completely different circumstances, cuddling by the fire with glasses of wine, musing on what the future has in store. In those rare moments when his mind cleared of all the things he needed to do, he’d come close to admitting to himself that despite all the money he and Jessica were accumulating, they were sacrificing the primes of their lives—him for the superrich and the ultra-shallow, that elite class who could drop seventy-grand to buff a few dents out of their noses, Jessica for faceless pharmaceutical companies in pursuit of the next billion-dollar drug. Between the ninety-hour workweeks and all the Saturdays in the office, even in those fleeting idle moments, he had to remind himself to look around and enjoy what he had, to tell himself how good he had it—the Lotus, the collection of ancient single malts, the four point two million dollar view of the Valley from his Mulholland mansion.

“I’m gonna need something for the pain,” Jessica whimpers.

“Soon as we talk with the sheriff, we’ll head down to the Benz. I’ve got Lortab in my suitcase. Jess, can you hang here on your own for just a second?”

“Why?”

“I want to go upstairs and check on something.”

“Please hurry back.”

He moves through the empty lobby, the walls adorned with stuffed, dead animals—an elk head over the hearth flanked by coyotes, a large brown bear standing on its hind legs, encased in glass, birds of prey frozen in mid-flight from wires in the ceiling.

Ron takes the steps to the second floor two at a time, emerging into a long corridor warmed by light from faux-lanterns mounted to the wall between the doors.

He walks a third of the way down the corridor and stops.

He approaches the nearest door, leans in, his ear pressed against the wood, hears only the bass throb of his heart.

Three rooms down, he drops to his knees and looks through the slit between the bottom of the door and the hardwood floor—darkness.

He stands, knocks on the door, no answer.

Goes to the next door and knocks even harder.

Pounds on the third.

“Is anyone on this floor?” he shouts.

-14-

The desk clerk glances up as Ron storms over.

“You wanna tell me what the hell’s wrong with you?”

Her eyes widen and she sets her book down spine-up and rises out of her chair. Short, heavy, late-fiftyish, her big eyes magnified through the thick lenses.

“I don’t care for that tone of voice even a little—”

“I don’t give a fuck what you don’t care for. I just came down from the second floor. It’s empty.”

“No, it’s not.”

A noise like a distant explosion briefly derails Ron’s train of thought.

“The rooms are all empty and dark.”

Jessica rises from the couch, coming toward them now.

“Did it occur to you that our guests are sleeping? Or perhaps having a late dinner out?”

“Every single one of them? Why won’t you give us a room? What have we done to you to—”

“I told you. I don’t have any rooms available.”

Jessica reaches the front desk, stands beside Ron, says, “What’s going on?” with her swollen lisp.

“They’re fucking with us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Baby, I just walked up to the second floor. There isn’t a single room occupied.”

Jessica focuses a smoldering gaze on the clerk. “Is that right?”

“Of course not.”

“Show us.”

“Excuse me.”

Jessica leans forward, lowers the napkin so the clerk can see the fishhook still embedded in her bottom lip.

“Show us.”

“I don’t have to show you any—”

“Bitch, I am an attorney, and I will make you a solemn promise right now. When I get back to LA, the very first thing on my agenda will be to call the top law firm in Denver, hire the meanest motherfucker on the letterhead, and sue your ass and this honkytonk piece of shit hotel for every last fucking cent.”

Ron feels so sure the desk clerk is on the brink of tears, it surprises him all the more when she leans forward and smiles at Jessica, her lips parting to speak.

The lobby doors squeak open, drawing everyone’s attention.

He wears a voluminous black parka dusted with snow, a sheriff’s star embroidered onto the lapel, smiling as he shelves his hat, clumps of snow dropping on the hardwood floor.

“Evening folks,” he says, striding toward them.

“Oh, Arthur.” The desk clerk bursts into tears. “They’ve been so mean to me.”

The sheriff arrives at the front desk. “What are you talking about, Carol?”

“This woman has been verbally abusive. Called me a cunt. Threatened to sue—”

Jessica says, “Wait just a—”

“You’ll get your turn.” To Carol: “Tell me what happened.”

“I tried to explain to these folks that we don’t have any room avail—”

“She’s lying!” Ron yells.

“Ya’ll need to take a walk,” the sheriff says, motioning toward the front doors. “Right over that way.”

Ron holds up his hands in deference, and he and Jessica backpedal toward the entrance.

The desk clerk points at Ron. “And that gentleman went up to the second floor and started banging on the guests’ rooms, screaming so loud I could hear him from down here. I’ve had numerous complaints.”

“And then his wife started swearing at you?”

“Him, too.”

“What’d he say?”

“I don’t remember exactly but he used the F-word a lot. They both did.”

Ron sees the sheriff reach across the desk and squeeze Carol’s hand. “I’m sorry, Carol. I’ll handle this.”

“Thank you, Arthur.”

The sheriff puts on his Stetson, turns, and advances toward the Stahls, a hybrid of a sneer and a scowl overspreading his face.

He stops, the steel tips of his boots two feet from the tips of Ron’s sodden sneakers.

“Sir, did you go upstairs and disturb the guests? Swear at—”

“I can explain—”

“No, don’t explain. Just answer the question I asked you. You and your wife do these things?”

“There isn’t a soul in this hotel but the four of us in the lobby, and that woman won’t sell us a room. Please. Just go up and look.”

Sheriff Hanson tilts his neck, vertebrae cracking, says, “Sir, you’re beginning to make me angry.”

“I’m not trying to make you angry, officer, I just—”

“Sheriff.”

“What?”

“Sheriff, not officer.”

“Look, we’ve had a terrible few hours here, Sheriff, and we’re just—”

The sheriff moves forward, a good four inches on Ron, backing him up against the wall, his breath spiced with cinnamon Altoids.

“You will answer my question. Did you do the things Carol said you did?”

“You don’t understand, she’s—”

The sheriff pinches Ron’s nose between the nostrils, fingernails digging into the cartilage, tugging him along toward the doors, kicking them open with his right boot, Ron losing his footing, the sheriff shoving him completely across the sidewalk into the foot of snow that has piled up in the empty parking space.

He hears Jessica say, “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

“Then walk.”

She runs over and helps Ron sit up in the snow, his nose burning, both of them glaring at the sheriff who stands under the canopy of the Lone Cone Inn, smoothing the wrinkles out of his parka.

“Take a guess what’ll happen if I see either of you again tonight?”

“You’ll throw us in jail?” Jessica mocks.

“No, I’ll beat the shit out of you. Both of you.”

Jessica scrambles to her feet and marches over to the sheriff.

“You see this?” she screams, pointing at her bottom lip.

“Yeah, you got a fishhook in your lip.”

“Your little restaurant over there—”

“I don’t give a shit. You’ve blown through all my good will. Now I own a blazing hot temper, and you’d do well to get out of my face right now.”

“Please, we just—”

“Right. Now.”

Ron has rarely seen Jessica ever back down, but something in the sheriff’s tone convinces her to retreat from the sidewalk—maybe the possibility that she might get slapped or worse.

“Let’s go, Ron.” She bends down, gives him a hand up, and he slides his arm around her waist as they start into the street.

Jessica glances back over her shoulder, yells out, “This isn’t over! You know that, right?”

“Best keep walking!”

-15-

“How’s the pain, Jess?”

“Bad.”

They trek down the middle of Main in the single set of tire tracks. Jessica walks ahead of Ron, crying, but he doesn’t dare attempt the distribution of comfort. He made that mistake the last time she was passed over for partner, and like an injured animal, the fear and sadness instantly metastasized into rage.

“I’m freezing, Ron.”

“I’m thinking.”

“You’re thinking?”

“I’ve been trying, but there’s no cell service in this valley.”

“Right.”

“No place to stay for the—”

“Quit telling me shit I already know.”

“Let’s just get back to the Benz. I have Lortab in my bag. We’ll tilt the seats—”

“We’re sleeping in our car now?”

“Baby, when the Lortab hits, you won’t know the difference from that seat and a bed at the Waldorf-Astoria. We’ll crank the heat, get it warm and toasty inside.”

“Jesus, Ron.”

“It’s the best I can do, Jess. They’ll probably have the roads plowed when we wake up, and then we’ll get the fuck out of this town.”

They near the end of Main, every building dark, no light but the muted glow of the streetlamps. A quarter mile ahead, Ron sees the gate lowered across the highway that climbs north out of town toward the pass.

Jessica says, “See that?”

On past the buildings of Main, near the city park, a bonfire shoots ribbons of flame into the sky.

They improve their pace, Ron noting a jolt of hope, thinking this could be a party of some sort, attended by people who might help them, but as he opens his mouth to suggest this to Jessica, she shrieks and starts running toward the flames.

-16-

Speechless, they stand thirty feet back, the Italian leather seats charred beyond any hope of salvation, the glass blown out, flames licking through the windows, the dashboard boiling, the scorching tires pouring black smoke up into the falling snow. Ron’s face tingles in the warmth, and it occurs to him that frostbite might be an appropriate concern.

“Why are they doing this to us?” Jessica asks.

“I don’t know.”

And he realizes that his wife doesn’t sound angry anymore, just confused and scared, and for the first time he feels it, too—not annoyance or frustration, but real tangible fear.

He puts his hands on her shoulders, and she lets them stay for a moment, then turns and faces him, the firelight refracting off the tears in her eyes.

“Hold me.”

As he embraces her, the lamps up and down Main wink out, and the drink machines at the visitors’ center across the street go dark and quit humming, and an oppressive silence blankets the town, nothing beyond the whisper of snow collecting on their jackets and the quiet hisses and exhalations from the burning Benz.

“Something’s happening,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s probably from the storm.”

“Do you really believe that, Ron?”

-17-

They walk up a side street lined with quaint Victorians buried under loads of powder, not a light in operation as far as they can see.

Ron opens the gate of a picket fence, and they trudge through snow to the front porch.

“What are you gonna say?” Jessica whispers.

“Tell them the truth. We need help.”

He grasps the brass knocker, raps it three times against the door.

A moment passes.

No one comes.

“Let’s try another house,” Ron says.

They try five more on that street, three on the next one over, but despite the vehicles in the driveways, proximate tracks in the snow, and other signs of habitation, every house they approach stands vacant.

-18-

Ron’s watch beeps 11:00 p.m. as they come to the corner of Main and 12^th, he and Jessica both shivering, the snow still dumping, and little to see but the impression of buildings and storefronts with the streetlamps out.

“We’re gonna die if we stay out here,” Jessica says, her teeth chattering.

Ron looks up and down the street, well over a foot of snow now on the pavement, the tire tracks completely covered, just a smooth sheet of snow across the road, the sidewalks, everything.

“Ron?”

A block down, on the outskirts of perception, he thinks he sees movement—figures draped in white.

“Ron! I’m freezing to death standing—”

“I have an idea.”

They cross the street and start south down the sidewalk.

“I can’t feel my feet, Ron.”

“Then you’re lucky. Mine are burning.”

Four blocks up, they cross 8^th, and Ron stops under a canopy with “Out There Outfitters” in block letters stitched into the façade of the canvas, the snow having blown against the cloth, covered most of the words.

“Why are we here?” Jessica asks.

“If we don’t get out of the elements, we’re going to die. I figure it’s better to break into a commercial space than a private residence, right, counselor?”

She stares at him like he’s lost his mind.

“Honey, you got a better idea?”

“No.”

“Then keep a lookout and pray this place doesn’t have an alarm.”

Ron lifts the chrome, cylindrical trashcan topped with a little cigarette butt-filled sand pit over his shoulder and runs at the storefront glass. The first strike sends a hard recoil back through the trashcan, which flies out of Ron’s grasp and smashes into the snowblown sidewalk, the glass still intact, unblemished. He lifts the trashcan and goes at it again, the next impact causing crystalline-shaped fractures to spread like a virus through the tall window. This time, Ron steps back and hurls the twenty-pound trashcan at the cracking glass.

It punches through, the window disintegrating.

Ron and Jessica wait ten seconds, eyes locked.

She says finally, “No alarm.”

“Or maybe it’s disabled ‘cause the power’s out.”

-19-

They climb down out of the storefront and walk past the cash register. Up ahead, a group of figures congeal Ron’s blood and he freezes, lets out a tiny gasp.

Jessica says, “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

Just a trio of mannequins outfitted in fly-fishing gear.

They move on past the display cases containing rock climbing hardware and an array of ice axes.

Against the back wall, mummy bags dangle from the ceiling, flanked by dozens of external and internal frame backpacks.

They pass through a rear doorway into a dark, narrow hall. Jessica tries the door to the bathroom, but it’s locked.

“Damn.”

“You gotta go, babe?”

“Yeah.”

“You should squat right in front of the cash register.”

“You’re a child, Ron.”

They head back into the store.

“There it is,” Ron says.

“Where?”

The darkness makes it nearly impossible to see, but in the middle of the room, between racks of overpriced Patagonia shirts and Columbia down jackets, a diorama has been constructed—dormant campfire ring, mannequins in sandals and tank tops cooking dinner in a camp stove, their backs to a two-man tent.

Ron and Jessica untie their shoes and strip out of their wet jackets and pants and crawl into the tent, into the sleeping bags, zip themselves up.

After several minutes of intense shivering, Ron notes the return of warmth—the electricity of pins and needles in his extremities, the burn of mild frostbite on his cheeks.

“You getting warm?” he asks.

“Little by little.”

He scoots his bag toward Jessica’s until he feels her breath in his face.

“How’s the pain?”

“Quit asking.”

“Sorry, I’m a doctor, it’s in my—”

“You’re a plastic surgeon.”

“Ouch.”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m just in a ton of pain here.”

“You think this is one of those experiences we’re gonna be able to look back on and—”

“Are you kidding?”

They lie in the dark, listening to the low moan of wind pushing through the broken glass of the storefront.

At length, Jessica sits up, says, “I can’t sleep. I’m too thirsty, Ron. All that wine and walking around—I just got dehydrated.”

“All right, you know that pot sitting out there in the fake campfire ring?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it out onto the sidewalk and fill it with snow. You’ll have to pack it in really tight. I’ll see if I can fire up the camp stove.”

-20-

Before starting his practice thirteen years ago, Ron was an avid outdoorsman, spending countless weekends in the Cascades, even squeezing in a weekend a month outdoors during the slog of med school. As he kneels by the fire ring in the dark and fumbles with the camp stove, he realizes how much the gear has changed in over a decade, evidenced by the five minutes it costs him to unravel the mystery of attaching the red canister of white gas.

As he screws it in, he hears Jessica climbing back through the storefront, pushing her way between clothing racks.

“How’s it going?” she asks.

He strikes the match, holds it to the burner.

The stove flares up.

As the fire burns down, quickly consuming the modicum of propane, he opens the gas, the lazy orange flame transformed into a low blue roar.

“Put it right here.”

She sets the pot down on the stove.

“Why don’t you get three water bottles—I saw them by the daypacks—and fill them up. It’s gonna take a lot of melted snow to fill this pot.”

While Jessica goes for more snow, Ron sits beside one of the mannequins, monitoring the stove, the heat cranked up to high, using a plastic spoon to stir the snow.

It takes longer than he anticipates, but soon he has half a pot of slush, which he pulls off the heat and transfers into a water bottle that formerly belonged to the cute blond mannequin in the tight pink sports bra.

He says, “Jess, what’s taking?”

Another minute crawls by.

He puts on his jacket and cold, wet shoes.

Turning down the heat, he stands and walks toward the front of the store, past the cash register, into the storefront.

Snow blows in through the shattered window.

Ron steps down onto the sidewalk.

“If you’re fucking around here, Jess, I will divorce you, ‘cause this isn’t even remotely…”

No response but the quiet patter of snowflakes on his jacket.

Ron glances down at the three water bottles lying in the snow, then the multiple sets of tracks leading up the sidewalk.

Twenty feet ahead, darkness and snow obscure everything.

His watch beeps midnight, and for a moment he feels sick with fear, sick to the point of vomiting, but he shoves it back into that long-forgotten nook in the pit of his stomach that he hasn’t needed since med school—those nights he woke in cold sweats in the dark, convinced he didn’t have the hardwiring to pass the boards.

-21-

In the cold, snowy silence, Ron walks up the sidewalk, his cheeks beginning to burn again, clutching in his right hand a wicked-looking ice ax with the price tag still dangling from the blade.

He’s slept outdoors in the desert waste of Canyonlands National Park, in the immense sweep of Denali where it got so quiet those Alaskan autumn nights (after the mosquitoes finally shut up) that he imagined he could hear the stars humming like distant generators.

The silence this winter solstice as he walks the empty streets of Lone Cone seems something else entirely—more a mask than an absence, and not a shred of peace contained within it.

The tracks turn down 3^rd Street, Ron’s legs aching as the snow melts and seeps through his khaki slacks. He wishes he’d thought to outfit himself in new, dry clothes from the hiking store, but it’s too late for that now.

Around the back of a late Nineteenth-Century brick building, he turns into an alley, and after twenty feet, arrives at a pair of doors without handles—the termination of the four sets of tracks.

He beats his fists against the doors, shouting, “Jessica! Can you hear me?”

If she can, she makes no answer.

Ron spins around, stares at a Dumpster capped with snow, at the power lines above his head, dipping with the weight of several fragile inches that have collected on the braided wire, hears a rusty door several blocks away swaying in the wind, hinges grinding.

It occurs to him that he might be losing his mind, and he sits down against the building and buries his head between his knees and prays for the first time in many, many years.

-22-

As he rounds the corner of Main and 3^rd, searching for something with which to break through the front of that brick building his wife has disappeared inside, light just ahead stops him in his tracks.

He feels certain it wasn’t there before, this soft glow of firelight flooding through windows onto the snow, and at least fifty pairs of skis leaning against the front of the building.

Ron jogs over, glancing up at “Randolph Opera House” painted in ornate red lettering that arches over the entrance, and the marquee above it which displays: “Dec. 22 - Midvinterblot.”

Through the windows that frame the doors, he glimpses an empty lobby illumined by candelabras.

The doors are unlocked, and he steps inside onto red carpeting darkened by the soles of wet shoes, sees a vacant concessions booth, coat closet, walls covered in framed posters advertising stage productions, autographed photos of musicians of modest fame who’ve played this opera house over the years.

He proceeds through the lobby into a darker corridor lined with closed doors that access the theatre, hurries through an archway on the right, and quietly ascends two flights of squeaky steps.

-23-

The balcony is sparsely peopled.

He slides into a chair in the front row, peers down through the railing, the opera house lit by three hundred points of candlelight, the lower level packed with what Ron estimates to be the entire population of Lone Cone, everyone extravagantly, ridiculously costumed as if they’ve come to a carnival or a masque—headdresses of immense proportion, the details lost in the lowlight, only profiles visible, and the room redolent of whiskey and beer and the earthy malt of marijuana smoke that seems to hover in the aisles below like mist in a hollow.

The stage is the spectacle, forested in real, potted fir trees, with a painted backdrop of the mountains enclosing Lone Cone in every season, all surrounding the strangest object in the theatre—a life-size golden bear which appears to have been forged of solid bronze.

It stands on its hind legs in a metal recess at center stage, and a line of people shuffle past, contributing pieces of firewood to the pit before returning to their seats.

This goes on for some time, while on stage left, a trio of men on guitar, fiddle, and mandolin enliven the theatre with bluegrass.

When everyone has taken their seats and the musicians abandoned their instruments, a tall man rises from the audience and takes the stage. Clutching a long candle and costumed like a Spanish conquistador, even though his silver helmet conspires to mask his identity, Ron pegs him for the sheriff who threw him out of the Lone Cone Inn several hours ago.

The conquistador raises his arms and shouts, “Come forth!”

At stage right, the red curtains rustle, then part, and two figures emerge dressed all in white, even their hoods, each holding an arm of Jessica Stahl, and at the sight of her, the crowd roars, Ron feeling a ripple of nausea until he notices his wife smiling, thinking, Has this all been some devious game?

They escort Jessica around to the back of the golden bear, step down into the pit, and one of them lifts a hatch in the back of the beast, while the other whispers something in her ear. She nods, accepting a clear mask attached to some kind of tank.

Jessica holds the mask to her mouth for a moment, then stumbles back, the crowd cheering, and she waves to the audience and blows kisses, the applause and whistles getting louder, long-stemmed roses spitting forth from the front rows onto the stage.

Jessica climbs into the golden bear, and the men in white close the hatch and return the way they came, vanishing through curtains off the stage.

The sheriff-conquistador raises his arms again.

The audience hushes.

He turns and approaches the golden bear, ducks down into the recess.

After a moment, he climbs back onto the stage and strides across to the left side, where he grabs a thick rope and pulls.

A trapdoor in the ceiling swings open, snowflakes drifting down onto the golden bear.

“Lights!”

A collective exhalation sweeps through the theatre, candles extinguished, the room pitch black.

Ron leans forward, squinting to raise some detail in the dark. A moment ago, he felt a passing twinge of relief, thinking there was some reason or logic behind this bizarre, awful night, but that is falling out of orbit now.

The room becomes silent, no sound but the occasional whisper flickering down below.

At first he mistakes them for lightning bugs—motes of ascending light down where the stage should be, but the snap of boiling sap and the sudden odor of woodsmoke corrects the error.

Out of the darkness surfaces a single image—the golden bear—though it’s no longer golden but the deeper reddish hue of molten bronze, and as the flames underneath it intensify, the bear glows brighter and brighter.

Ron says, “Oh, Christ.”

The bear bellows, a high-pitched, Jessica-sounding roar, her voice channeled through a complex of tubes that curl to the right of the bear’s glowing head like a brass tumor, and words mix in with the screams, but the tubes and the pain slur them into nonsense, the bronze clanging now like a huge cymbal as Jessica desperately beats against it from inside, her juices dripping through holes in the bear’s haunches, sizzling on the stage.

Someone in the crowd shouts, “Another year of plenty!”

“No avalanches!”

“No cancer!”

“More tourists!”

And they are clapping now, down below, the applause building, stoned and drunken toasts being proffered from every corner of the theatre, fighting to be heard amid the tortured commotion emanating from the stage, the golden bear smoking as snowflakes fall through the ceiling onto the brilliant bronze, instantly vaporizing.

Somewhere in the darkness behind him, a woman weeps, and a man whispers, “Shut the fuck up!”

Ron jumps out of his seat and stumbles back down the stairwell, spewing vomit on the walls, reemerging into the dark corridor, racing toward the nearest door, throwing it open to wafts of woodsmoke and a sweeter-smelling incense that he knows is his wife, roasting inside the golden bear.

He starts into the theatre into an awful, disengaged clarity rooted in shock—people turning away from the horror onstage to see this uncostumed tourist with vomit down his jacket, barging in like he’s come to fuck up a wedding.

The screaming of the bear has become harsher, the voice inside blown out, winding down, and Ron sees those white-masked executioners break through the curtains on stage right and rush down the steps into the outer aisle.

Something inside him screams Run.

-24-

Ron crashes into the doors of the Randolph Opera House and bursts out of the theatre, back down the sidewalk, kicking up clouds of snow as he runs toward the north end of town.

After three blocks, he glances over his shoulder at the hordes of people spilling out of the theatre, a handful stepping into skis, flashlight beams arcing toward him.

He turns left onto 7^th and runs so hard he can’t think about anything but the incomprehensible pressure in his lungs, sprinting past a chocolate shop, a closed hostel, the street taking a steep pitch as it descends toward a spread of ground so level, it can only be a frozen pond.

Behind him comes a whoosh—a shirtless twentysomething, her long blond hair flowing in her wake and dressed like some Viking goddess right down to the horned helmet, gliding toward him on a pair of skis, accelerating as the street steepens, five seconds away at most.

Ron digs his heels into the snow and slides to a stop and turns, the skier racing toward him, inside of ten feet.

He swings, the serrated blade punching through the side of her neck, Ron temporarily blinded by warm mist from the severed artery, the ice ax all the way through. He tries to grip the rubber-coated handle to rip it out, but the blood has made it slippery and the Viking Goddess slides away from him, still skiing down the street, her hands trying to extract the blade.

Ron wipes the blood out of his eyes, and fifty yards up the street, sees a herd of people make a wide, sliding turn around the corner of Main and 7^th, a crowd of thirty or forty tearing down the street after him, screaming, shouting, yeehawing, laughing like a throng of revelers cut loose from the world below.

He runs down to the skier who has fallen over in the snow, sticks his foot against her head for leverage, and jerks the ice ax out of her throat.

Then running again, falling, scrambling back onto his feet, veering into the yard of a private residence, a dog accosting him through a bay window, thinking if he doesn’t find some way to escape his tracks he doesn’t have the faintest hope.

Up ahead, more shapes materialize out of the dark, a dozen perhaps, and smaller, their voices high-pitched—a band of children tramping toward him through the snow.

Ron looks back, can’t see the pursuing crowd through the blizzard, but he can hear them calling out to him.

Twenty feet ahead, on the shore of that frozen pond, his eyes lock on the remnants of a recent battle—saplings thrust into the snow supporting handmade flags (Stars and Stripes vs. the Jolly Roger) and opposing snow forts, their features smoothed and hidden by the storm.

-25-

Ron crawls through a snow trench, his hands aching in the cold, somehow manages to still himself as a collection of footsteps approach.

“I’m cold.”

“Shut up, pussy, if we find him, you know how sweet Christmas will—”

“I’m not a pussy.”

“Okay, twat. Wait, look.”

“That’s just the others.”

An adult male voice shouts, “Hey, who’s there?”

“Just us!”

“Us who?”

“Chris, Neil, Matt, Jacob—”

“What are you kids doing?”

“Helping.”

“No, you’re fucking up the tracks. Shit.”

“What’s wrong, Dave?”

More footsteps arrive.

Ron crawls a little further through the trench, his hair, eyelashes, eyebrows snow-matted, too scared to even register the cold.

The trench leads into a small cave constructed of cantilevered bricks of packed snow, the voices muffled now.

Ron rises up shivering onto his knees. There had been a lookout window, but it’s buried in new snow. He reaches forward, pokes his finger through the soft powder, which all falls in at once.

He ducks down, the voices audible again.

“…little organization would go a long fucking way.”

“Hey, watch the language around the kids, bro.”

“You understand what’ll happen if—”

A woman breaks in, “You’re not thinking, Dave.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What’s his primary objective right now?”

“I don’t know…getting out of town?”

“How? In this storm? With his car toasted? No, he needs to get out of this miserable weather or he’ll freeze to death.”

The voices begin to fade, Ron lifting up, peering through the window, watching the crowd move by, down toward the frozen pond.

Light passes through the window, and he prostrates himself on the floor of the snow cave, listening for some indication he’s been seen.

After a while the voices have vanished completely, and he looks out the window again, the crowd nothing but distant, restless lightbeams, barely visible in the storm.

-26-

Ron massages his bare, blistered feet to get the blood circulating, colder than he’s ever been in his life, though he doesn’t think he’s freezing to death. This little snow fort is actually warm.

He wonders how long he’s been inside—thirty minutes, forty-five tops—and he’s spent most of it trying to convince himself this can’t possibly be happening. He’s had “horror dreams” before—car accidents, the death of friends and family, being chased by a murderous street gang through a parking garage, life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit—but he always wakes up and the fear always leaves.

Even as he sits there, rubbing his cold, wet feet, he has a rock-solid premonition that in mere moments he will wake in that hotel in downtown Flagstaff he and Jessica checked into a little over twenty-four hours ago. It was their first night on the road, and they dined at a gem of a pizza joint near the university, went straight to the hotel, made love, and crashed, tired and giddy with the thrill of finally being on vacation, next stop Colorado.

He tells himself, and he believes, that he still sleeps in that hotel room. He’s really tossing in bed as he hides in this snow cave, Jessica probably kicking him under the covers, swearing at him in that sexy, sleepy voice of hers to quit moving or take his restless ass over to the sleeper sofa.

-27-

Ron inhales the scent of hotel linens and forced air from an unfamiliar central heating system, the covers soft between his legs.

He throws an arm across the mattress, feels the figure of his wife asleep beside him, her naked back rising and falling against his hand.

Later, they sit at breakfast, cream-cheesing bagels.

The light that blazes into the room washes out everything on the periphery and even the rogue strands of Jessica’s hair glow like incandescent silk.

“I had the worst dream last night,” Ron says.

“Tell me about it.”

He thinks for a moment, says, “I forgot.”

“Chilly in here.” As Jessica rubs her arms, Ron notices her breath clouding. He’s grown cold as well. He reaches down to lift his bagel, and it looks like a bagel, the circumference lightly browned, the lox spread warming on the surface, but when he touches it, it crumbles in his fingers like snow, freezing to the touch.

He says, “Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“Nothing, it’s…everything’s fine.”

“I’m so glad we came on this vacation,” Jessica says, but she’s turned into the Viking Goddess, the ice ax run through her throat, blood pulsing out of the side of her neck and making a sound exactly like a lawn sprinkler.

Ron tries to stand, thinking if he can walk outside into that clear morning light and climb into his Benz, Jessica will be there. He can make this real.

“We have to stretch this out,” he says, but the light passing through the windows has already begun to erode, the darkness encroaching so fast he can no longer see across the table, and then he’s back in the snow cave, curled up against the freezing wall, and so despairing, he believes he’s gone to hell, recalling from his collegiate reading of Dante’s Inferno (as if his subconscious has retrieved the most horribly perfect memory shard just to fuck with him) that the innermost circle of the underworld is built of ice.

-28-

Ron rises up slowly out of the trench.

It has stopped snowing, the sky blackish-cobalt, infected with stars.

He thinks he hears voices on the far side of town, but as he spins slowly around, he sees nothing but dark houses, smoke the only movement, trickling out of chimneys.

-29-

The snow comes to his knees.

He jogs through the powder, staying on the west edge of town where backyards border a stream that has all but frozen over, eyeing the dark windows of the houses he runs by.

The stream curves him back toward Main as he approaches the north edge of town, and ten minutes after striking out from the snow fort, he moves past the city park and the torched Benz, the frame of the SUV having cooled just in time to allow for the collection of a delicate half-inch of powder.

-30-

The sign reads, “Road Closed Due to Hazardous Driving Conditions.”

Ron swings a leg over, briefly straddling the yellow gate.

He falls onto the other side, engulfed by snow, stands up and brushes his clothes off as best he can, his fingers stiff, on a welcome descent from excruciating toward a beautiful numbness.

Beyond exhaustion, he sets off at the fastest walk he can manage, while in the east, the sky lightens above a skyline of jagged peaks—a warm lavender that chokes out the stars.

He trudges on through the predawn silence, crying, thinking, Jess is dead.

Passes another sign: “Aspen 23.”

The road climbs at a five percent grade, and he stops, breathless after an hour of walking, looks back, sees the valley the town rests in five hundred feet below where he stands.

He inhales a shot of cold, thin air. The spruce trees on the left side of the road droop with snow. Off the right shoulder, the mountainside falls away in a series of cliffs and steep forest, a thousand feet down to a frozen river.

He hears a distant growl.

The way the echo carries, it sounds like a vehicle coming down the mountain, but the lights—four of them—race up the road out of Lone Cone.

In the calm, subzero air, he studies the tone of their motors, the velocity with which they travel over the buried highway.

Snowmobiles.

He starts running, gets ten steps, then stops, looks back down the road—a narrow plane descending into Lone Cone, his tracks as clear as day.

Up ahead, the road makes a sharp left turn with the contour of the mountain.

Nothing to do but run, his arms pumping again, the momentary adrenaline charge making up for the loss of air.

The whine of the motors sounds like a swarm of giant bees closing in as he reaches the curve in the road, the noisy snowmobiles dropping into silence as he puts the mountain between them and himself.

He looks back over his shoulder trying to—

A horn screams.

He turns back to face a huge orange truck, ten feet and closing.

Ron bee-lines for the left shoulder and dives into a snowbank as the plow rushes by, burying him under sixty pounds of snow as the blade scrapes the powder off the road.

-31-

Ron lies on his back, suffocating in darkness, clawing at the snow and on the verge of losing consciousness.

His hand breaks through, fresh air flooding in, accompanied by idling snowmobiles and nearby voices.

He pulls his hand back into his chest, wondering if he’s been seen, enough of the snow on top of him pushed away to glimpse a piece of the morning sky and an overhanging fir tree.

Two helmeted figures walk into view, Ron praying he won’t have to fight, his fingers so numb he can’t even feel them holding the ice ax.

The two figures gaze up the mountainside for several minutes.

One of them shrugs.

Then they walk back into the road, out of view.

He can hear them talking, can’t pick out a single word.

After a while, the snowmobiles wind up and speed away.

-32-

By midmorning Ron has covered three miles. It should have been easier traveling on the plowed highway, but his legs hurt so much the improvement is negligible. The exquisite pain makes concentrating difficult, and sometimes he forgets to listen for the distant, insect-whining of the snowmobiles.

-33-

At eleven a.m. he crawls up the highway, the pavement sun-warmed under his swollen, frostbit hands that have turned the color of ripe plums.

-34-

Ron lifts his head off the road, the surrounding snow so brilliant under the midday sun, like diamonds, he can’t see a thing but brightness.

He might have been hallucinating, but he feels reasonably sure that something’s approaching, can’t tell from which direction or the size of the incoming vehicle, realizes that a part of him (gaining greater influence by the minute) no longer cares if they find him.

The next time he manages to raise his head, he’s staring into the grill of a Dodge Ram, hears the sound of a door swinging open, glimpses heavily-scuffed cowboy boots stepping down onto the road.

-35-

The exchange of light and darkness as the firs scroll by and the sun blinking at him between the trees has the same discombobulating effect as a strobe light.

Ron pulls his forehead off the glass and looks across the cab at the grizzled driver—long, gray hair, a beard as white as a sunbleached skull, black sunglasses, and beneath all that ancient hair, a face so gaunt it does more to underscore the bones beneath.

He looks over at Ron, back at the road.

Ron whispers, “Where are we going?”

“Huh?”

“Where are we going?”

“What were you doing laying in the middle of the road, son?”

Ron feels exceedingly strange, a degree of weakness worse than the recovery following the three marathons he’d run in his twenties combined.

He wants to answer the man, but with the lightheadedness, he fears he might say the wrong thing, if there is a wrong thing to be said, so he just repeats himself: “Where are we going?”

“You were in Lone Cone last night?”

Ron sits up a little straighter, strains to buckle his shoulder harness.

“Yes. My wife and I.”

“Where’s she?”

Ron blinks through the tears that well up instantly in his eyes.

“You ain’t saying nothing,” the old man says, “but it’s plenty.”

They ride on in silence.

Another sign: “Aspen 10.”

“Used to live in Lone Cone,” the old man says. “Beautiful place. Moved up the road a ways fifteen years ago. Couldn’t take another winter solstice. I ain’t saying it’s wrong or right, or hasn’t had something to do with keeping that town like it is, but for me…I couldn’t do it no more. Every year, there’s talk of quitting the blot altogether. Probably happen someday. God, I miss that town.”

-36-

The truck stops under the emergency room entrance of the Aspen Valley Hospital, and the old man shifts into park.

“I can’t go in there with you,” he says.

Ron reaches down and unbuckles his seat belt, puts his hand on the doorknob.

“Hold on there a minute, son.” Ron looks up at the old man, who removes his shades and stares back at him through one bloodshot, jaundiced eye, one perfectly clear and perhaps a size too large—glass. “It ain’t often someone manages to slip away.”

“I just left her.”

“Wasn’t a thing you could’ve done, so you might as well start letting that go. But what I’m trying to tell you is this. Twenty years ago, a woman got away. She went to the Aspen police, told them everything that was done to her, how they murdered her husband, and you wanna know what happened?” The old man points a long, dirty finger into Ron’s shoulder. “She died in prison four years ago. Convicted of drugging her husband and setting him on fire in their car while on vacation in the peaceful town of Lone Cone. You can’t go up against a whole town, son. You hear what I’m saying? They’re already preparing for you to come back with law enforcement making crazy claims. Don’t do it. Don’t ever go back there. You walk into that hospital and tell them you and your wife got lost in the mountains, and you barely made it out.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s the only chance you got.”

Ron opens the door, climbs down out of the enormous truck.

As he turns back to close the door, the old man reaches across the seat and slams it shut himself.

The truck’s knobby tires squeal as it roars away from the hospital.

-37-

Ron stands once more on the corner of Main and 3^rd.

He squeezes his wife’s hand, says, “I’m gonna go in here for a minute.”

“I’ll walk down to Starbucks. You’ll come meet me?”

It feels good stepping out of the maddening August heat and into the theatre—a hundred and fifty-two years old according to the plaque on the brick beside the entrance.

Ron passes through the lobby, through the archway, and climbs two flights of stairs on his tired legs.

He doubts he’s plopped himself down in the same seat he occupied that night, but the view down onto the stage looks exactly like the dreams that still plague him.

Below, a janitor emerges from underneath the balcony, pushing a mop bucket down the center aisle.

-38-

“Excuse me, sir?”

The janitor looks up from his mop bucket, says, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

“The door was unlocked.”

As Ron arrives at the base of the stage, the janitor’s eyes fall on what remains of Ron’s left hand—everything lost to frostbite but the thumb.

Ron places the janitor around seventy, the man small and wiry. He asks, “How long have you lived here, sir?”

“Forty-five years next month.”

“No kidding.”

“Look, I gotta finish up here.”

“Could I just ask you one little favor?”

“What’s that?”

Ron’s heart pounds under his Hawaiian shirt, his mouth gone dry.

“I want to see the golden bear.”

“What the hell are you talking—”

“The brazen bear you bring out every winter solstice.”

The janitor smiles and shakes his head, leans against the mop handle. “You’re one of those people, huh?”

“What people?”

“Once or twice a year, some conspiracy freak comes along asking about the winter solstice celebration, and didn’t this town used to—”

“I’m not asking, and I’m not a kook. I was here, sir, twenty-nine years ago, December twenty-second, Twenty-Aught-Four.”

“You must be con—”

“I watched from the balcony while you roasted my wife inside the golden bear.”

For a moment, the theatre stands so quiet, Ron can hear the murmur of traffic out on Main, the janitor staring him down with an oblique combination of anger and fear.

Ron says, “I didn’t come here to hurt any—”

“I told you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you—”

“And I got work to do.”

The janitor turns away and pushes his mop bucket toward the far right aisle that in Ron’s dreams are always lined with white-masked executioners.

-39-

He walks slowly down the sidewalk among the throng of tourists, sweating again after half a block.

The waterfall has dried up, and the sky, so blue and pure all those years ago when he and Jessica first came to town, has faded into a pale and dirty white.

Main Street looks the same, although the two lanes have been divided into four to accommodate the tiny vehicles, and there are traffic lights and automated pedestrian crosswalks now at every intersection. Some of the older buildings have been demolished, but most remain to be dwarfed beneath the five- and six-story apartment buildings.

The “Welcome to Lone Cone” sign boasts a population of just under nine thousand.

Ron glances at the hillsides above town, overridden with condos and trophy homes.

Above them all, a Wal-Mart sits perched on a manmade plateau, and behind it the immense gray peaks stand snowless under the brutal summer sun.

-40-

Ron waits twenty minutes in line for a cup of dark roast, then joins his wife at a table near the window.

“How’s your latte?” he asks.

“Delicious.”

Starbucks world music trickles through speakers in the ceiling like a slow-drip IV.

“Could we spend the night here, Ron? It’s so beautiful—”

“I’d rather not.”

She reaches across the table, holds his hand.

“When we leave here, do you want to show me where you stumbled out of the mountains? Maybe we could stop on the side of the road, say a few words for Jessica?”

“Sure, we could do that.”

“You regret coming here.”

“No, it’s not that. I always knew I would.”

“Must feel strange after all this—”

The knock on the window startles them, and Ron glances up to see the janitor peering through from the sidewalk.

-41-

Ron and the janitor sit on a bench at the termination of 7^th Street, on the bank of a filthy pond inhabited by a single mangy-looking duck.

“We thought you’d come back,” the janitor says. “Right after, I mean. Wise you didn’t.”

“Town’s changed,” Ron says.

“Beyond recognition.”

“Does Lone Cone still practice—”

“God, no. People went soft, couldn’t stomach it. Quit believing in the usefulness of such a thing.”

“Usefulness?”

“You hear about the avalanche?”

Ron shakes his head, swats away a swarm of flies that have discovered the sweat glistening on his bald scalp.

“Second winter after we quit the blot, we caught a blizzard. Hardest we’d ever seen. The slide came down that chute right there.” The janitor points to a treeless corridor on a nearby peak that runs right into the town. “Destroyed fifty homes, killed a hundred and thirty-one of us. I still hear them, broken and screaming under the snow.”

“Some might call that divine retribution.”

“I lost my wife and two sons that night. Almost everyone left after that. Sold their land to developers. Then the second homes started cropping up. Chain stores. Texans and Californians.” He sweeps his hand in disgust at the bustling little city, heat shimmering off the buildings and streets. “Until it became this. I keep saying I’ll leave one of these days. Nothing really left for me, you know? Not my town anymore.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“‘Cause you at least saw this place when it was a piece of heaven. When it was perfect. I almost feel a kinship with you.”

“I had to quit practicing medicine,” Ron says. “Lost everything I’d worked for. Fucked me up for a lot of years.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“But then I met a beautiful woman. We had three beautiful children.”

“Glad to hear that.”

Ron pushes against his legs, groaning slightly as he struggles to his feet.

“My wife’s waiting for me in the Starbucks.”

“We weren’t monsters.”

“I better get back.”

Ron starts walking toward the commotion of Main.

“They’re gone,” the janitor says, Ron stopping, looking back at the small, sad man on the bench.

“What’s gone?”

“The old ways.”

“The old ways had a dark side.”

Ron turns away from him and walks across the heat-browned grass, trying to remember what the mountains looked like without all the glass and steel.

The janitor calls after him, “So do we, Mr. Stahl, and now there’s nothing to remind us.”

-42-

We are spread across the country now, old and dying or dead already, and we have mostly acclimatized to the absurdity of daily life in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, although occasionally we regress and rant.

To journals.

Our fellow dinosaurs.

To our children who bring their children to visit us in nursing homes.

We go on about how it used to be—the extinct and glorious slowness of life and other artifacts:

The pleasure of eating real food, seeded and grown out of ground proximate to your own doorstep.

Decency.

Community.

Respect for the old traditions.

We tell all who will listen, but mostly ourselves, that we once lived in a perfect little town in a perfect little valley, where life was vivid, rich, and slow.

And once in a while, someone will ask why it can’t be that way again, and we tell them sacrifice. There’s no sacrifice anymore. And they nod with enlightened agreement, that special condescension reserved solely for the old, without the faintest idea of what we really mean.

Read on for an interview with Blake Crouch, excerpts from all four of his books, Desert Places, Locked Doors, Abandon, and Snowbound, and a bonus excerpt of Serial Uncut by Crouch, Kilborn, and Konrath…