I tried to turn it into a joke; I suppose I was looking for a way to deflect the feeling I suddenly had of being under a microscope. But, for once, Carl didn’t laugh and I heard his footsteps crunching throw the snow as he ran to catch up with me.
“No, I want to understand this, Josie. You’ve never killed one of those things?”
His tone implied disbelief, that perhaps he suspected me of leading him on to some grand punch line. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him and continued to study the never-ending field of white that stretched out before us.
“Nope. Never.”
“But you said you had a shotgun?”
“Yeah, I said I had a shotgun. Never said I
Carl was silent for a moment as he mulled over this distinction and I listened to the Doc’s labored breathing and the soft swishing noise made by the stretcher as it was drug through the snow.
“How the hell are you still alive, kiddo?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I don’t know. Luck maybe? I’ve just been really good at avoiding them, I guess. Except for the silo. That was just stupidity on my part.”
“You’ve
I sighed and felt my chest tighten with frustration. Why was it so hard for him to believe I could make it as far as I had on wits alone?
“Look, Carl… I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life practicing non-violence. I’ve embraced vegetarianism. I believe that every life is sacred, that there is a spark of the Almighty within every leaf, every squirrel, every person, dog, fish, or chicken.”
My tone was sharper than I had intended but somehow it felt as though a decade and a half of my personal beliefs were being put on trial.
“You probably don’t know how hard it is just to abandon everything you ever believed in. Seeing as how, by your own admission, you don’t believe in anything.”
“Look, Josie, I didn’t …”
“But I look at those things and I wonder how they fit in. I won’t kill a rabbit just so I can eat its flesh to stay alive. But would I kill one of them if I were being threatened?”
“Josie, I…. ”
I had grown so angry that tears streamed from the corners of my eyes and left icy trails down my cheeks; my hands were balled into fists so tightly that my knuckles ached.
“So don’t lecture me, okay? Don’t sit there all smug and mighty on your high horse and tell me how wrong I am because I’m having a little fucking trouble figuring out how my beliefs fit in with all this shit.”
We walked in silence for a while; I stomped through the snow with more force than was required while Carl lit and smoked the last cigarette from his dead man’s pack.
“Look, Josie,” he finally said softly, “I didn’t mean no offense. And I’m truly sorry for riling you up that way. I was just kinda shocked, that’s all. Hard to believe someone could be out here so long and never had to kill one of them bastards.”
I nodded my head silently and began trying to replay the conversation in my head. Had he really said anything to ignite the fury I’d unleashed on him? Or had he simply been a handy target for the conflict that raged within me?
“Believe you me, there’s a lot of killing I wish I could go back and erase. A lot of death I’d rather just forget. So, in a way, I really envy you, I guess. Your conscience is clean. And that’s pretty damn rare these days.”
There was something in the way his voice cracked, something in the pain that tinged his words, that made me finally glance at him out of the corner of my eye.
“See, there was this time when all this began that I…. ”
For the first time in half an hour or so, Doc’s voice boomed through our conversation.
“Town!”
Our heads snapped to attention and there it was: one of those little clusters of buildings that seem to pop up out of nowhere in the flat fields of the Midwest; like an oasis of brick and wood in a sea of withered cornstalks poking through waves of snow. The town seemed so tiny from this distance, like a scale model that had been constructed in God’s basement, but the shapes of houses and stores were unmistakable.
“I reckon about an hour and a half or so and we oughtta be there. Sound about right to you, Doc?”
The wind had started to blow a little causing Carl’s words to seem as if he were much further away than he actually was.
“Give or take, yeah, that’s a pretty accurate estimate.”
And, just like that, our first argument came to a close as we trudged on toward a little town that, we hoped, would have the supplies we needed to save Sadie’s life. But I always wondered: if Doc hadn’t spotted the town, what would Carl have told me that day? What closely guarded piece of his past would he have brought out into the light?
By the time we were within half a mile of the town, the wind had picked up to the point that we had to turn our heads away from its force just to see where we were going. Carl and Doc had swapped positions with the stretcher and for a while he and I had tried to make conversation with Watchmaker. The old man, however, was not in a talkative mood and the chill of the wind quickly dashed any further attempts at brightening his mood.
Silently, I’m sure we were all praying for the same thing: a small-town pharmacy that had remained unlooted or perhaps a doctor’s office with supplies of medicine still intact. Though muffled by the piles of cloth covering her and the howling of the wind, we could still hear Sadie cough every now and then and with each wet hack my heart fluttered with concern.
“What the fuck?”
The urgency in Carl’s voice made us all turn our heads into the wind from which we had previously tried to hide. In the distance, a wall of white advanced across the prairie like something from a biblical passage: it towered fifteen, maybe twenty, feet in the air and blotted out everything within its path, seeming to devour the occasional tree and crooked fence line as it barreled toward us.
“Holy shit…. ”
“We gotta move people!” Doc yelled out. “We gotta move now!”
“What the fuck is it?”
Doc dashed to the end of the stretcher and picked up the other end so that it was like a bridge connecting him to Carl.
“White out.” he called out. “Biggest fucking one I’ve ever seen. Now move!”
Doc barked out the words like a drill sergeant, leaving no room for further discussion as he and Carl tried to run through the snow without toppling Sadie into the dunes.
“Watchmaker, grab Josie’s coat. Josie you grab mine and for God’s sake people keep up and don’t let go!”
As Doc would later tell us, this type of whiteout is created when a strong wind surges across the plains; the wind scatters powdery snow and lifts it on its gales, scooping up millions of tiny crystals with each passing second. With no mountains or natural barriers to impede progress, it forms what he referred to as
We knew we’d never make it to the town before the storm overtook us, but we needed to close as much distance as we could before it hit. The whiteout could blow by us in as few as five seconds… or it could rage around us for much longer, depending on how strong the wind was.
“Move, move, move!”
We couldn’t risk getting turned around in squall, wandering further and further from the town that possibly held Sadie’s only hope for survival. There was no other option than to push forward as quickly as we could.
We’d closed maybe half the distance by the time the howling winds blasted against our bodies with the force of a linebacker. I wasn’t prepared for how strong the gust would be, hadn’t braced myself for the shock of nature pushing at me with all of her might.
I staggered sideways, stumbled over my own feet, and fell face first into the snow. At the same time, I was
