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 3rd 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!
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 3rd, 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,
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.
